The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories

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The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories

by Aimee Bender (Goodreads Author)

3.97 of 5 stars 3.97 · rating details · 3,693 ratings · 407 reviews

A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the wa...more

Paperback, 184 pages

Published August 17th 1999 by Anchor (first published July 13th 1998)

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Feb 25, 2012 Joshua Nomen-Mutatio rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories, fiction

This book is a perfect example of how judging a book by its cover can be problematic. Had I never gathered non-cover-related compelling reasons that I might like this book I may've never picked it up, based on that quick, cliche judgment of the book binding's face. The cover looks, hmm, what's the word, twee. Cutesy. Quirky. Etc. Not exactly the kind of thing I like to read. But its contents, while being whimsical to some degree, are much more richly textured with moods than mere variations of q...more This book is a perfect example of how judging a book by its cover can be problematic. Had I never gathered non-cover-related compelling reasons that I might like this book I may've never picked it up, based on that quick, cliche judgment of the book binding's face. The cover looks, hmm, what's the word, twee. Cutesy. Quirky. Etc. Not exactly the kind of thing I like to read. But its contents, while being whimsical to some degree, are much more richly textured with moods than mere variations of quirky cutesy whimsy.

I recently described another five-star short story collection as being like, "Aimee Bender's wrist-slashing bedroom-sulking little sister," despite the fact that, "Aimee Bender, while able to dabble with the grotesque via misleadingly sunny build-ups, doesn't take it to the same heights many of the stories in this collection do." Now, it would be helpful if people had read the book I was comparing this one to, but since I only know of a very small number of people that've read Unclean Jobs For Women and Girls I'll have to try to give a better description.

It's been long enough between reading this and now that I can't conjure up many super specific rehashings of the book. Regardless, I can still recall what it was that I loved about it in general.

The stories, much like many in Ryan Boudinot's Littlest Hitler, spin yarns centered around the fantastical and the bizarre but with a straight face. This is a basic approach to books and film that I love and Ms. Bender pulls it off with a deliciously elegant precision that I find pleasurably enviable as someone who tends to veer into the overly-elaborate when writing. She homes in on that bulls-eye of 'brevity = wit' in a seemingly effortless manner; the arrow plucked and secured, the bow drawn, aimed and triggered all in one graceful, fluid motion.

These couple-of-bites-sized tales tickle the imagination sectors of the brain into lighting up the fMRI read, massage the abdominals with laughter, and gently squeeze the heart at just the right moments. A lovely experience, which momentarily pulled me out of the darkened hallway I was sitting in at the time (overnight shift at a treatment center for juvenile sex offenders) as well as the black hole my head felt like then, for reasons too personal and too raw and probably too boring to elaborate on.

Thanks for that, Aimee.(less)

24 likes · like · see review

Feb 02, 2009 Sharon rated it 2 of 5 stars

There's no doubt that Aimee Bender has a vivid imagination and a penchant for the strange. Unfortunately, for me that is simply not enough to make for a memorable, satisfying read. I came away from this collection with an overwhelming feeling of disappointment.

Sure, the writing is fine and it even sparkles on occasion. There are enough strange things happening to catch anyone's interest, at least momentarily. The problem is a lack of depth. Every single story felt superficial to me, as if it was...more

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Oct 01, 2007 Ben rated it 2 of 5 stars

How funny that I should have just read the essay "A Reader's Manifesto", by B. R. Myers, when I picked up this book. In the essay (available at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107... for now) Myers skewers various superstars of "literary fiction"--Cormac McCarthy, Rick Moody, David Guterson, and others--for turning out poorly-written books that are all flash and no substance. The brilliantly bizarre set pieces here, unfortunately, suffer from the same problem. Bender is all about the good sent...more

12 likes · like · see review

Apr 09, 2013 Jas rated it 5 of 5 stars

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
― Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

take Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa, especially the writing style and slight drips of metaphysicalness, spirituality, and imagery, slather it with Haruki Murakami; but don't over do it. Add a dash of Karen Russell (when she is on her game).... and you have this book.

these stories, while completely, definitely grounded in their ownness, are somehow linked. The linking is personal, and grounds the read, or at least...more

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Jun 22, 2008 Yulia marked it as left-unfinished

Recommended to Yulia by: Konstantin Steshenko

Shelves: short-stories

It was suggested she was a female Etgar Keret, but Keret is far more artful and thoughtful in his shorts. Whereas I have the sense he's a melancholy and thoughtful man who hides his sensitivity with a cuddly veneer, I feel Bender is a Keret-wannabe who hides her lack of insight and wisdom with her cute, "imaginative" story lines.

2 likes · like · see review

Jan 06, 2010 jess rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009, fiction

I read this book because my friend Imogen Binnie told me that she loves (LOVES!) Amy Bender. Imogen has good taste in books, so I thought, How Could This Be Bad? I requested it from the library. I had a sense of déjà vu reading this book; I have read one (or more) of the stories in one of their previously-published incarnations. So in that case, it was like an old friend and a friend of a friend, plus I read it in one of my favorite places (the bathtub), and the point I'm making is that this boo...more

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Oct 16, 2007 Kristi rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: middling, fourstars

I read The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and found it bitter, brittle and melancholy. It's a book of short stories and they are very memorable and well written stories. She uses a lot of magical realism in them, like in the story of the father who woke up with a hole going straight through his body, though he remained in perfect health and the one with the stolen ruby that turns everything it touches red. But the characters and their relationships are superficial and facile. Not in the way they ar...more

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May 20, 2013 Ian Wood added it

Note that this one is definitely not young-adult, unless it's a very mature young-adult! This is the complete review as featured on my blog.

I don't know if Aimee was on a Bender when she wrote this but this is one of the most off-the-wall books I've ever read, so naturally it appealed to me immensely. It's a collection of 16 rather zen-like short stories in a number of parts, but since I can't be discussing a woman's parts in a blog like this, those shall remain anonymous!

The Rememberer is a sto...more

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May 11, 2012 Vincent Scarpa rated it 4 of 5 stars

I first read this collection in high school, loved it despite not really 'getting' any of it, and over the past few years would crack it open every now and then to read the first two stories—"The Remember," and "Call My Name." "The Rememberer," because I'm continually moved by that story's narrator; her grace and her grief. And "Call My Name," because I'm always amazed at the way Bender can get a reader [specifically, me] to sympathize with characters who lack any redeeming qualities whatsoever....more I first read this collection in high school, loved it despite not really 'getting' any of it, and over the past few years would crack it open every now and then to read the first two stories—"The Remember," and "Call My Name." "The Rememberer," because I'm continually moved by that story's narrator; her grace and her grief. And "Call My Name," because I'm always amazed at the way Bender can get a reader [specifically, me] to sympathize with characters who lack any redeeming qualities whatsoever. [I also admire the way Bender navigates the tragedy and the inherent humor in that narrator's disposition; how her self-delusion/narcissism is both very, very sad and very, very funny.]

Over the past few days, I decided to give the whole collection a read-through and see if I couldn't hang my hat on the stories that came after these two favorites as well. As was the case in high school, there are still a few of these stories I just did not, for lack of a better word, get. A story like "Marzipan," though I much enjoyed the sentence-level writing and thought the premise itself was inventive, still left me unsatisfied and feeling like I'd missed the set-up, the punchline, or both. I felt that way about a few other stories, too—like "Legacy" and "Drunken Mimi." While I don't doubt there's intention at work in those stories, it was certainly lost on me.

That said, I love so fiercely the other stories in this collection that I quickly forgive those stories [and "The Healer," too, which seems to be a favorite here but left me puzzled] and applaud the rest. "What You Left in the Ditch," "Fugue," "Dreaming in Polish,"—these are wonderful stories. My favorite story of the bunch, though, is "Skinless." If you held a gun to my head I couldn't tell you why, only that it made me feel immensely hopeful and inestimably sad at the same time, which is the work of short fiction. Which leads me to what I've come away with after the re-read: the idea that, in Bender's stories, understanding is not nearly as important as evocation. What the stories bring to the surface in the reader surely matters more than anything else.
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Apr 22, 2010 Mike rated it 4 of 5 stars

Lots of weighty subject matter in this book, but it all stemmed from fantastical plots, situations, or character attributes (e.g., girl with flaming hand). The characters themselves, though, seemed only loosely sketched and insubstantial. Like they were there primarily to advance the storyline, rather than the author's message or intention. Does that make sense? Of course if the intention is bundled up in the storyline then the characters do wind up serving the author's intention in a sort of me...more

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Oct 17, 2009 Ben Loory rated it 4 of 5 stars

i've read aimee bender stories before but never a whole book at once. i think to be honest i like them better spaced out. but that's my fault, i suppose, and not hers. not like she's got a gun to my head.

anyway, bender writes short, perfectly structured surreal first-person stories. well, mostly first person. sometimes third. there's a story about a man who wakes up with a hole going directly through his stomach, and then his wife becomes pregnant and gives birth to her own mother. but it's firs...more

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Jul 26, 2009 Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance rated it 4 of 5 stars

Do you ever add books to your wishlist and forget who recommended a book and how you first heard about it and why you wanted to read it? I wish I knew who recommended this book to me....In a sentence, it is one odd book. In this book of short stories, you never know what is going to happen. You might go to school with an imp or an ice girl. Your father might develop a hole through his stomach the size of a soccer ball. You might fall in love with a robber who takes you along on his jobs. The sto...more

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Apr 15, 2009 Scalder rated it 4 of 5 stars

Look for my April review on this one: www.anewscafe.com.

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Sep 23, 2012 Emanuela rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: e-book, narrativa-straniera

L'autrice pubblica questa raccolta all'età di ventinove anni.
Vederla seduta nell'auditorium al Festivalletteratura di Mantova sembra che il tempo per lei si sia fermato. Oggi ne ha quarantatre.

E' una Signora -inizialmente l'avevo presa per una ragazzina- dal viso aperto, allegra, serena e si direbbe del nostro sud e invece l'accento tradisce la sua provenienza californiana. Ma sempre di sud si tratta.
Gesticola, sorride. Alla domanda: "Ma a lei come vengono in mente le situazioni dei suoi racc...more

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Feb 19, 2012 Jeniffer Almonte rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, quit-reading, reviewed

"The Girl in the Flammable Skirt" is Aimee Benders highly (highly) whimsical collection of short stories. In one of Aimee's stories a man evolves backwards until he becomes a fish. In another a man wakes up to find his stomach is missing and instead there is huge hole in the middle of his torso. Meanwhile that man's wife becomes pregnant and gives birth to... well, I won't say because it's a spoiler. But let's just say what she gives birth to isn't a baby.

And so on and so forth. Every story has...more "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt" is Aimee Benders highly (highly) whimsical collection of short stories. In one of Aimee's stories a man evolves backwards until he becomes a fish. In another a man wakes up to find his stomach is missing and instead there is huge hole in the middle of his torso. Meanwhile that man's wife becomes pregnant and gives birth to... well, I won't say because it's a spoiler. But let's just say what she gives birth to isn't a baby.

And so on and so forth. Every story has a series of bizarre twists. But what I want to emphasize is that I am not against these bizarre twists. You want your character to wake up with a hole in his stomach? FINE! But don't let that character go to work and then come home and eat dinner like usual, please. Don't wait to address the issue of how his digestion works until you visit the doctor after dinner. And why is he waiting so long to go to the doctor?? Why spend 12 stomach-less hours without getting some medical advice? I mean, it's silly but these are kinds of questions going through my mind. In other words, I was so willing to engage with Aimee on her turf. I really and truly was. But it just wasn't possible.

This whole book is like those kooky exercises I used to do in the writing workshop I took my freshman year of college. "Write a story where everything is blue/your main character is a germ/the world is made of Cheerios". But my writing teacher was always very stern about what would make the exercise useful--introducing the strange element, yes, but then having the story develop in an organic way, make sure the world is real somehow.

Aimee's goals were the opposite of this. As soon as you accepted one premise she wants to impress you with a new one. And I understood this impulse because when I was a freshman in college, I used to write stories JUST like that. What I figured out eventually was that writing isn't about finding a new and clever way to say something old. It was about finding a way to say something, anything, SUCCESSFULLY. Whether you found a new or an old way was besides the point. Good writing is not about shuffling things around to see what sounds cool. It just isn't.

Anyway, I wasn't going to review this book because, what could I even say? What was there to critique? But then it occurred to me....one of the stories was good. It's about a man who comes home from war without lips, and instead he has little plastic pieces. That was it, that was the twist. No other twists followed and the rest of the story developed with rich, human characters and recognizable feelings. Therefore when Aimee is able to reign herself in, she can write. For whatever reason, this realization allowed me to rate and review her book.

And it just wasn't good. The good ideas were drowned out by the bad ones.

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Sep 08, 2009 Saxon rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book has a whole bunch of filler. I am sorta baffled how such filler... okay, "stories", ever made it to print. That being said, there are a few enjoyable reads in here as well. Thus, the two star rating on Goodreads which apparently = "It was OK" is how I mostly feel about this collection.

Aimee Bender likes the gimmick. Most of the stories in this collection revolve around one surreal characteristic or occurrence that could never exist in the real world and attempts to build a story around...more

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Jan 27, 2009 Jason Jordan rated it 3 of 5 stars

The first time I read this, I gave it four stars. Recently I had to reread it for a fiction class, and after pouring over it a second time, I have no choice but to lower the score to a three. Initially, I think I was enchanted with Bender's work due to her unique plots and characters. Following my second run through, I can't say that there were many characters I liked, and the characters I did like usually weren't the protagonists.

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Jan 31, 2013 Melissa rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: speculative-fiction

Right now, I'm hoping there is another book of short stories authored by Aimee Bender.

I'm also hoping I can teach Creative Writing again, so that I can suggest this collection to budding writers. I heard it: "Write what you know." I've spouted it ad nauseum with all good intentions. My students would write about rape, murder, and drugs...yes, they'd all, for the most part, had experienced these things tangentially; but there was always something real that was missing in their attempts. I could...more

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Jan 10, 2009 Rhi rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories-pieces

I think of that girl I read about in the paper - the one with the flammable skirt. She'd bought a rayon chiffon skirt, purple with wavy lines all over it. She wore it to a party and was dancing, too close to the vanilla-smelling candles, and suddenly she lit up like a pine needle torch. When the boy dancing next to her felt the heat and smelled the plasticky smell, he screamed and rolled the burning girl up in the carpet. She got third-degree burns up and down her thighs. But what I keep wonderi...more

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Jan 26, 2011 Pam rated it 5 of 5 stars

This collection of short stories really knows how to capture your attention. These stories definitely take you to unexpected places. There are surprising twists with every turn of the pace. I liked the opening story, The Rememberer, because it really makes me look at how people change and how they almost are like a new creature at times. Sometimes, they change so much that it's better for you to accept that they aren't who you once knew. Then you have to make a decision...is it better to set the...more

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Dec 02, 2008 Jennn rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

You're going to like it or not. There seems like there's only a small middleground, which is (ironically) where I stand.

There were very strong stories mixed with "snappy, chic, in-your-face, over-the-top" stories that were about "pain" and "human ugliness" and such, but I saw a lot of flash and pop phrases in a forced surreal world. A woman giving birth to her mother. A librarian having sex with every man she sees out of grief. A woman in love with a man only because of his hunchback and leaves...more

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Aug 22, 2010 Christina rated it 5 of 5 stars

These stories do what a John Donne poem does--they plunk you down in the middle of action that's already going, present a few rules of whatever world you've landed in, and then let the current carry things away. For example, consider the opening lines of the story The Healer, which is one of my favorites: "There were two mutant girls in town: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice. Everyone else's hands were normal." Here's another opening line, from the story Legacy: "...more

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Jun 03, 2007 Snarky's rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: anges-faves, laff-o-lympics, repeat-offender, this-was-recommended-to-me

I love this quirky collection of short stories. I read this book a long time ago and recently reread it. The stories are still moving and funny and ridiculous and sharply written. I like this better than her novel. It seems as though she's unable to sustain all the good things about her short fiction in a longer work.

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Apr 08, 2009 Kirsten rated it 4 of 5 stars

Look, most of you on my Goodreads friends list are not going to like this collection. I do not recommend it for you. You will probably leave it unfinished, annoyed that you spent the money on it, and slightly cynical about any of my future book recommendations. Do not read this book. Unless...

Unless you're ok with sifting through this odd collection of freakshow characters, mundane settings and surreal plots to discover prose that cuts right through you and stories that leave you aching (usually...more

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May 03, 2013 Lady Strawberry rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

16 racconti deliziosi. Aimee Bender usa il surreale e il fiabesco per raccontare sentimenti, condizioni e stati d’essere in cui possiamo riconoscerci tutti. Un realismo magico attuale e contemporaneo che trova nella forma del racconto la sua migliore via d’espressione, dove la scrittura essenziale della scrittrice acquisisce valore e si impreziosisce, a differenza di ciò che accade, a mio pare, nei romanzi, dove la sua aleatorietà sembra confondere il lettore più che aiutarlo a vivere la storia....more

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Feb 10, 2012 Lori Weir rated it 5 of 5 stars

I wish I could give this more than 5 stars! It was a wonderful collection of short stories that I could not put down. With her surreal touch this collection reads like a series of quick dreams - some disturbing, some funny, and all without regard to the laws of reality. The stories are about community, about relationships, about the intrigue of being both an outsider and an insider and about deciding whether or not to face and accept the truth often within the same story. These odd, rambunctious...more

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Oct 31, 2007 oriana rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: phenomenal, read-2007

All's I am saying is, if you do not love Aimee Bender yet, get this book, read Skinless, Fell This Girl, The Healer, and The Ring. If you still don't love her after that, I'm not really sure we can be friends anymore.

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Oct 29, 2012 Gail rated it 3 of 5 stars

I read this collection of short stories because I really liked the author's novel, "The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake." As with most collections, not all the stories were great. (I've read only a handful of s.s. collections in which I thought all the stories were good!) A fair number of them had some sort of erotic theme. I found it odd that the title came from a brief allusion to a girl wearing that dangerous (!) skirt, at the very end of the book. My favorite story was called "Fugue"; it co...more

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Aug 25, 2012 Rachel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: short-story-collections

This collection of short stories was weird and wonderful. I had read Aimee Bender's work before - I adored The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake - but this was so out there and strange yet the prose was fluid and delicious to read. Descriptions were vivid, characters immediately engaging and individual, leaping from the page saying 'look at me! I am different but have real emotions!'

There were quite a few short stories in this collection, and a nice mixture of the bizarre, the supernatural and t...more

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Sep 26, 2012 Camilla rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-on-kindle

My second Aimee Bender book - and I like her more and more :) My love for short stories is relatively new, but this collection is exactly the sort of book that started that love in the first place. Short weird stories that are more about the feeling you get when reading them, than any specific storyline.

And Bender does this perfectly - the odd story of the hunchback who wasn't a real hunchback and therefore lost the love of a woman, the backwards evolutionary man and other stories that to share...more

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About Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender is the author of the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures. Her work has been widely anthologized and has been translated into ten languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

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