The Color Master

May 13, 2013
Bender became a bestselling novelist with The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, but her new collection returns readers to her real forte: short stories that combine gnomic postmodern prose with whimsical fairy tale reveries. And yet whimsy is an odd word to apply to the wife of “The Red Ribbon,” who insists her husband pay her top dollar for every coupling, or “The Fake Nazi,” about a secretary who becomes obsessed with the life story of a guilt-ridden old man who turns himself in for war crimes he claims to have committed. Even the tales that resemble children’s storybooks, like the title story (a clever subversion of Charles Perrault’s “Donkeyskin”) and “The Devourings,” are haunted by a taut, sardonic melancholy. Dressmakers labor to perfect the color of moon, a talented seamstress mends the tears in tigers’ fur, ravenous ogres vomit the bones of their victims—“an insistent movement from feet up to mouth” results in body parts that “lay there in the grass, glazed in a layer of spit and acid”—and a piece of cake stuck in a tree becomes talisman to Bender’s brand of sweet dripping darkness. But the best stories are mood pieces about the mysteries of female friendship (“Bad Return”) and bittersweet pageants populated by mall-worshipping adolescents (“Lemonade”), still fanciful but so light on gimmick that the reader senses—like the lovelorn atheist in “The Doctor and the Rabbi”—“the realization that there were many ways to live a life.” Many ways to write a life too, and Bender colors them with a tincture out of dreams. The world is everywhere present in this collection, but it gets the moon in, too. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.

July 1, 2013
Stories that range from fairy tales to quasi-erotica, all showing Bender's versatility as an author. "Appleless" starts us out with an allegorical tale of a girl who refuses to eat apples, a lack of appetite that makes her suspect in an apple-eating world. She eventually inspires such suspicion that she's assaulted by a pack of apple eaters, and in response, the orchard withers. (One startling and disconcerting note in this story is that the narrator identifies as one of the pack of attackers.) The titular story also verges on fairy tale. In it, the Color Master is consulted whenever a dyeing job of particular importance is needed--the duke's shoes, for example. One day, the narrator, a lowly apprentice, gets a request for a dress the color of the moon, a task made more challenging because the Color Master has become ill. Bender mines a more sensual vein in stories like "The Red Ribbon," in which a woman spices up intimacy with her husband by insisting on being paid for sex (this after hearing her husband recount an incident about his college roommate once bringing in prostitutes). Her entire marriage then starts to work on the basis of quid pro quo, even down to washing the dishes. "On a Saturday Afternoon" involves the narrator's indulgence in a sexual fantasy in which she invites two male friends to come to her apartment so she can get turned on by watching them kiss. Bender's gifts as an author are prodigious, and with each story, she moves the reader in surprising, not to say startling, ways.

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August 1, 2013
Bender's first short story collection since Willful Creatures (2006) once again opens the door to surreal otherworlds where master seamstresses mend broken tigers and an ugly woman weds an ogre only to have her heart broken when he's tricked into eating their six children. Bender ventures into the real world as well, exploring the psyche of a woman who becomes obsessed with role-playing with her husbandto the eventual detriment of her marriagein The Red Ribbon. In The Fake Nazi, a man's guilt over his brother's misfortunes and the part he feels he has in them leads him to insist that he committed atrocious acts during WWII. On a Saturday Afternoon finds a young woman living out a sexual fantasy that leaves her feeling unfulfilled afterward. A solitary college student befriends a lonely older man and discovers a ring she threw away in his possession in Bad Return. Bender has an extraordinary gift for drawing readers into her magical, mesmerizing tales, and those looking to lose themselves in fiction will not be disappointed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

March 15, 2013

Beloved by those in the know, Bender is nothing if not unexpected in her premises; the protagonist of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake could taste the sentiments of those who had prepared the food she ate. In these darkly sparkling stories, two sisters learn to stitch together torn tigers, a woman married to an Ogre forgives him when he inadvertently eats their children, and a group of apple eaters eagerly await the arrival of a girl with hair like shining wheat.

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