Aimee Bender

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse.
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...

Aimee Bender sits down with Heidi Julavits to discuss her book, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Lillo Wei reads an excerpt from the book.

As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerized writers from Philip K. Dick to Aldous Huxley. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, urban sprawl, and diversity, Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative. This debut title of a new city-based anthology series features brand-new tales from 14 of the...

"It has been more than thirty years since the term "flash fiction" was first coined, perfectly describing the power in the brevity of these stories, each under 1,000 words. Since then, the form has taken hold in the American imagination. For this latest installment in the popular Flash Fiction series, James Thomas, Sherrie Flick, and John Dufresne have searched far and wide for the most distinctive American voices in short-short fiction. The 73 stories...