In Leonora Carrington’s 1938 short-story masterpiece “The Debutante,” a young woman wants to disobey her mother’s orders to go to a debutante ball, so she asks a hyena she has befriended to go in her ...

Readers of Aimee Bender’s short fiction have come to expect the extraordinary—whether it’s a tale’s surprising premise or its masterful conclusions, Bender rarely disappoints. In her latest, she ...

Bender became a bestselling novelist with The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, but her new collection returns readers to her real forte: short stories that combine gnomic postmodern prose with ...

We gathered in a circle in the side room and talked about mirrors, and still water, and wells, and feeling understood, and opals, and then we did a creative-writing exercise about our first memory of ...

Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, shows her versatility as an author in a collection of stories that range from fairy tales to quasi-erotica. “Appleless” starts us out with ...

Aimee Bender’s stories lean to the surreal. Her subjects, often inhabiting surroundings drawn from the fantastic, are porous: They absorb their environment while living at its mercy. These disparate ...

Author Aimee Bender is renowned for her subversive approach to storytelling, and her new collection of short stories doesn’t disappoint. Like her previous collections, “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt ...

In the late 1950s, after he had spent years of tracking down the weirdest and most supple Italian folktales, Italo Calvino worried reality would pale for him. “For two years I have lived in woodlands ...