Aimee Bender's writing defines "cutting edge" on the current U.S. fiction scene.

Her career debuted in 1998 with a collection of surreal and beautifully realized stories,

Girl In the Flammable Skirt, described as "visionary" and "precocious" by reviewers.

Girl In the Flammable Skirt was selected that year as The New York Times Notable

Book of the Year. Her follow-up novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own, not only received

instant acclaim but became an international success. Her most recent collection,

Willful Creatures--which took seven years to write and has also been translated into

multiple languages--continues even now to garner rave reviews. Critic Jessica Shaw

says, "To curl up with an Aimee Bender story is to thank heaven you ever learned to

read in the first place. What a treat to spend 15 stories in Bender's vast and

wonderfully unhinged imagination." Willful Creatures which was nominated by The

Believer as one of the best books of the 2005.

Her short fiction has been published in countless journals, including Granta, GQ,

Harper's, Tin House, McSweeney's, The Paris Review. She is the recipient of two

Pushcart prizes, and was was a TipTree award nominee in 2005. Bender's language

style has been compared to Ernest Hemingway's, but her literary influences are tied

to the French Surrealists and to Italo Calvino, 20th century Italian novelist famed for

his fantastical and allegorical tales as well as his stream-of-conscious narrative technique.

Aimee Bender, a Los Angeles native and graduate of the prestigious M.F.A. Program in

Writing at U.C. Irvine, is now a professor of Creative Writing at University of Southern

California. We are delighted that Bender will join us for an extraordinary reading of her

work on April 26.

Bibliography

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (book)

An Invisible Sign of My Own (novel)

Willful Creatures (book)

On-Line Resources