Aimee Bender. (2013). The Color Master: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Aimee Bender. 2013. The Color Master: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Aimee Bender, The Color Master: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013.

Aimee Bender. The Color Master: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013.

OverDrive Product Record

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1. • value: family
2. • value: relationships
3. • value: 21st century
4. • value: Friendship
5. • value: literary fiction
6. • value: romance
7. • value: Fiction
8. • value: crime
9. • value: short story collections
10. • value: novels
11. • value: anthology
12. • value: marriage
13. • value: love
14. • value: Coming of age
15. • value: love story
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17. • value: feminist
18. • value: women
19. • value: Short Stories
20. • value: Drama
21. • value: Women's Fiction
22. • value: Modern
23. • value: magical realism
24. • value: Contemporary Romance
25. • value: feminism
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27. • value: Essays
28. • value: Music
29. • value: literature
30. • value: American Literature
31. • value: fiction books
32. • value: fantasy
33. • value: short stories collections
34. • value: short story anthology
35. • value: gifts for women
36. • value: gifts for her
37. • value: realistic fiction books
38. • value: women gifts
39. • value: long story short
40. • value: books fiction

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Bender, Aimee
   • bioText: AIMEE BENDER is the author of the novels The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake—a New York Times bestseller—and An Invisible Sign of My Own, and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures. Her works have been widely anthologized and have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.
   • name: Aimee Bender

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title

The Color Master

fullDescription

The bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake returns with a wondrous collection of dreamy, strange, and magical stories.
Truly beloved by readers and critics alike, Aimee Bender has become known as something of an enchantress whose lush prose is “moving, fanciful, and gorgeously strange” (People), “richly imagined and bittersweet” (Vanity Fair), and “full of provocative ideas” (The Boston Globe). In her deft hands, “relationships and mundane activities take on mythic qualities” (The Wall Street Journal).
In this collection, Bender’s unique talents sparkle brilliantly in stories about people searching for connection through love, sex, and family—while navigating the often painful realities of their lives. A traumatic event unfolds when a girl with flowing hair of golden wheat appears in an apple orchard, where a group of people await her. A woman plays out a prostitution fantasy with her husband and finds she cannot go back to her old sex life. An ugly woman marries an ogre and struggles to decide if she should stay with him after he mistakenly eats their children. Two sisters travel deep into Malaysia, where one learns the art of mending tigers who have been ripped to shreds.
In these deeply resonant stories—evocative, funny, beautiful, and sad—we see ourselves reflected as if in a funhouse mirror. Aimee Bender has once again proven herself to be among the most imaginative, exciting, and intelligent writers of our time.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Los Angeles Times
   • content: "Aimee Bender is at her wickedly best in her latest short-story collection, with tales both dark and comic....Bender's work has never been the stuff of manic pixie dream-girl lit. Her fairy tales are dark and wicked, not hipster-precious and faux old-timey. Her sorcery altogether avoids the saccharine, and the thrills and chills of this sometimes sexual, often horror-drenched collection are completely adult. At a time when realism reigns supreme over the literary landscape, one can argue it is absolutely imperative that Aimee Bender be spotlighted for what she is: a vital MVP of modern letters, period...In our world of flash-and-trash insta-Internet-oddities and stranger-than-fiction social-media-bloopers, she will have surpassed the simple feat of inventiveness to own a most dazzlingly urgent relevancy."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Chicago Tribune
   • content: "The Color Master offers 15 new tales that dazzle, confound, electrify, disturb, incriminate and empathize. It is sympathetic toward cake that cannot die and hopeful about the healing arts of darkness. It is absurd. It is remarkable. It induces mental whiplash...And it's so vividly imagined, so unusual, that those of us who read books with the hope of encountering language and ideas we haven't encountered before will feel -- well, we'll feel heard."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: "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 whimsical fairy tale reveries...[T]he best stories are mood pieces about the mysteries of female friendship ('Bad Return') and bittersweet pageants populated by mall-worshipping adolescents ('Lemonade'), still fanciful but so light on gimmick that the reader senses -- like the lovelorn atheist in 'The Doctor and the Rabbi' -- 'the realization that there were many ways to live a life.' Many ways to write a life too, and Bender colors them with a tincture out of dreams. The world is everywhere present in this collection, but it gets the moon in, too."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: "Stories that range from fairy tales to quasi-erotica, all showing Bender's versatility...Bender's gifts as an author are prodigious, and with each story, she moves the reader in surprising, not to say startling, ways."
5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 13, 2013
     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 whimsical fairy tale reveries. And yet whimsy is an odd word to apply to the wife of “The Red Ribbon,” who insists her husband pay her top dollar for every coupling, or “The Fake Nazi,” about a secretary who becomes obsessed with the life story of a guilt-ridden old man who turns himself in for war crimes he claims to have committed. Even the tales that resemble children’s storybooks, like the title story (a clever subversion of Charles Perrault’s “Donkeyskin”) and “The Devourings,” are haunted by a taut, sardonic melancholy. Dressmakers labor to perfect the color of moon, a talented seamstress mends the tears in tigers’ fur, ravenous ogres vomit the bones of their victims—“an insistent movement from feet up to mouth” results in body parts that “lay there in the grass, glazed in a layer of spit and acid”—and a piece of cake stuck in a tree becomes talisman to Bender’s brand of sweet dripping darkness. But the best stories are mood pieces about the mysteries of female friendship (“Bad Return”) and bittersweet pageants populated by mall-worshipping adolescents (“Lemonade”), still fanciful but so light on gimmick that the reader senses—like the lovelorn atheist in “The Doctor and the Rabbi”—“the realization that there were many ways to live a life.” Many ways to write a life too, and Bender colors them with a tincture out of dreams. The world is everywhere present in this collection, but it gets the moon in, too. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 1, 2013
     Stories that range from fairy tales to quasi-erotica, all showing Bender's versatility as an author. "Appleless" starts us out with an allegorical tale of a girl who refuses to eat apples, a lack of appetite that makes her suspect in an apple-eating world. She eventually inspires such suspicion that she's assaulted by a pack of apple eaters, and in response, the orchard withers. (One startling and disconcerting note in this story is that the narrator identifies as one of the pack of attackers.) The titular story also verges on fairy tale. In it, the Color Master is consulted whenever a dyeing job of particular importance is needed--the duke's shoes, for example. One day, the narrator, a lowly apprentice, gets a request for a dress the color of the moon, a task made more challenging because the Color Master has become ill. Bender mines a more sensual vein in stories like "The Red Ribbon," in which a woman spices up intimacy with her husband by insisting on being paid for sex (this after hearing her husband recount an incident about his college roommate once bringing in prostitutes). Her entire marriage then starts to work on the basis of quid pro quo, even down to washing the dishes. "On a Saturday Afternoon" involves the narrator's indulgence in a sexual fantasy in which she invites two male friends to come to her apartment so she can get turned on by watching them kiss. Bender's gifts as an author are prodigious, and with each story, she moves the reader in surprising, not to say startling, ways.

     COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     August 1, 2013
     Bender's first short story collection since Willful Creatures (2006) once again opens the door to surreal otherworlds where master seamstresses mend broken tigers and an ugly woman weds an ogre only to have her heart broken when he's tricked into eating their six children. Bender ventures into the real world as well, exploring the psyche of a woman who becomes obsessed with role-playing with her husbandto the eventual detriment of her marriagein The Red Ribbon. In The Fake Nazi, a man's guilt over his brother's misfortunes and the part he feels he has in them leads him to insist that he committed atrocious acts during WWII. On a Saturday Afternoon finds a young woman living out a sexual fantasy that leaves her feeling unfulfilled afterward. A solitary college student befriends a lonely older man and discovers a ring she threw away in his possession in Bad Return. Bender has an extraordinary gift for drawing readers into her magical, mesmerizing tales, and those looking to lose themselves in fiction will not be disappointed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     March 15, 2013
     

     Beloved by those in the know, Bender is nothing if not unexpected in her premises; the protagonist of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake could taste the sentiments of those who had prepared the food she ate. In these darkly sparkling stories, two sisters learn to stitch together torn tigers, a woman married to an Ogre forgives him when he inadvertently eats their children, and a group of apple eaters eagerly await the arrival of a girl with hair like shining wheat.

     Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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The bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake returns with a wondrous collection of dreamy, strange, and magical stories.
Truly beloved by readers and critics alike, Aimee Bender has become known as something of an enchantress whose lush prose is “moving, fanciful, and gorgeously strange” (People), “richly imagined and bittersweet” (Vanity Fair), and “full of provocative ideas” (The Boston Globe). In her deft hands, “relationships and mundane activities take on mythic qualities” (The Wall Street Journal).
In this collection, Bender’s unique talents sparkle brilliantly in stories about people searching for connection through love, sex, and family—while navigating the often painful realities of their lives. A traumatic event unfolds when a girl with flowing hair of golden wheat appears in an apple orchard, where a group of people await her. A woman plays out a...

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