The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories

by Aimee Bender

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Book cover for The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

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"A collection of wistful, witty stories." --Esquire 
"Hilarious, deep and a little bit dirty." --Harper's Bazaar


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 war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips?

Aimee Bender's stories portray a world twisted on its axis, a place of unconvention that resembles nothing so much as real life, in all its grotesque, beautiful glory. From the first line of each tale she lets us know she is telling a story, but the moral is never quite what we expect. Bender's prose is glorious: musical and colloquial, inimitable and heartrending.

Here are stories of men and women whose lives are shaped--and sometimes twisted--by the power of extraordinary desires, erotic and otherwise. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is the debut of a major American writer.

A 1998 New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the best works of fiction of 1998.
  • ISBN10 0307804461
  • ISBN13 9780307804464
  • Publish Date 28 June 2014 (first published 17 August 1999)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Imprint Anchor Books
  • Format eBook
  • Pages 104
  • Language English