Willful Creatures: Stories

I, on a whim, purchased this book. The title itself was engaging. This book was nice in the fact it is made up of short stories. I found though after completion I only loved two out of its entirety and it only liked maybe five. Some of the short stories were either too smart for me or felt like they were incomplete. That said, I was glad to have read it. Just I didn’t yield a rave review from this content.

I've read and reread these stories and they are imaginative and quirky. I've often thought wistfully of the little man story - please publish something new!!

This is a tremendous book. I liked The Girl in the Flammable Skirt very much but this book...it hits a little harder. All of these stories are fantastic. The one about the pumpkin head couple that have a son with an Iron head is amazing. Its so unreal yet the emotion it evokes is an intense combination of every real feeling the reader has ever felt. Its about being an outcast. Its about being loved anyway-or rather, because of our eccentricities. And she writes with such lyrical subtlety...the words read smoothly and quick but looking back (i read this about a year ago) i can recall so much detail and feeling. These stories are more tangible than you will realize. Read it.

I love the works of Aimee Bender. Willful Creatures proves that Bender does not stale with age, but get better and better and better. I recommend all her works, of course, but I believe Willfucl Creatures to be her best. A MUST READ for all fans of magical realism, stories about relationships and/or heartache, or just good stories in general. An evening spent with Aimee Bender is an evening spent in bliss.

This is one of the strangest short-story collections I have ever read. Then again, I had come to expect that from the author of the brilliant short-fiction book The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. Now Aimee Bender writes some rather dark, strange and disarming stories in Willful Creatures that will truly shock you and keep you thinking long after you finish reading each story. The characters are nameless, unflinching in their actions and quite unlikeable, doing things that will repel and compel you at the same time. From bad parents, shameless seducers and abusers who target upon the weak, this collection has it all. My favorite stories are "The Leading Man," "Debbieland," "Dearth," "The Meeting," and "End of the Line." All of the stories are amazing, but the aforementioned ones stood out the most for me. I marvel at Bender's writing style. She reminds me a great deal of Amanda Filipacchi in that she mixes the outlandish with the mundane in an astonishing, hilarious twist. Are you in the bargain for some literary and surreal short stories? I recommend you read Willful Creatures. And give The Girl in the Flammable Skirt a whirl while you're at it.

This collection is darker than Aimee Bender's first. It contains a few stories in her "signature" fairy tale/magical realist style, including one featuring a family with pumpkin and clothes-iron heads and one about a boy with a hand made of keys (whose destiny unfolds as he discovers which lock fits each). But my favorite here are less twisted with symbolism. "Debbieland" is layered with anger and desire, and she deftly uses the first person plural to reveal just how disconnected the narrator is from herself. "Off" is angry too: it may or may not star the heiress character we met in The Girl In The Flammable Skirt, an idle and beautiful woman partial to inappropriately dressy couture who finds herself in infuriating and embarrassing situations when she tries to elicit attention from men. In "Off" she decides to collect kisses from three men chosen by hair color, and finds herself confronted with the unfinished buisness of her last relationship; by the end of the story this haughty and self-confident woman is reduced to hiding in the coat closet with a pile of coats, hoping that the man she "doesn't love" will come and find her there. Aimee Bender is still growing and developing as a writer, and this book is a fascinating look into her maturing voice. She's always been adept, original, witty, and strange. Now she's finding her depth. I expect great things to come from her.