Showing results by author "Aimee Bender" in All Categories

We are being watched. That this statement no longer shocks is itself shocking. Post-Snowden, we know that the government - everywhere - has been reading our emails, listening to our phone calls, and watching whatever we do on the Internet. The only thing concealed is the nature of our watchers. In Watchlist, some of today's most prominent and promising fiction writers from around the globe respond to, reflect on, and mine for inspiration the surveillance culture in which we live.

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.

On the night her mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter. Next to the couch on which she’s sleeping, there is a lamp that catches her eye, its shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie sees a dead butterfly floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see.   

The award winning series of classic and contemporary fiction returns with a collection of darkly funny short stories by the likes of Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Aimee Bender, A.M. Homes, Nathan Englander, Kim, Addonizio, and George Saunders. Readers include Anjelica Huston, Neil Gaiman, Michael Imperioli, Harris Yulin, Christina Pickles, Jefferson Mays, and Christine Ebersole.

The author of An Invisible Sign of My Own, whose work has been presented at Selected Shorts performances, discusses her second novel, a lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. She is interviewed by Heidi Julavits (novelist and co-editor of The Believer). A selection is performed by Lillo Way.

Electric Literature Aloud! is a compendium of 10 short stories from the anthology series. The editors select stories with a strong voice that capture readers and listeners and lead them somewhere exciting, unexpected, and meaningful.