The Color Master

by Aimee Bender

In this collection, Bender’s unique talents sparkle brilliantly in stories about people searching for connection through love, sex and family – while navigating the often painful realities of their lives. A woman plays out a prostitution fantasy with her husband in ‘The Red Ribbon’ and finds she cannot go back to her old sex life. An ugly woman marries an ogre in ‘The Devouring’ and struggles to decide if she should stay with him after he mistakenly eats their children. ‘Tiger Mending’ follows two sisters who travel deep into Malaysia where one learns the art of mending tigers who have been ripped to shreds, and in the title story, 'The Color Master', a company of tailors endeavour to capture the colours of the sun, moon and sky.

Evocative, funny, sad and beautifully written, The Color Master cements Aimee Bender’s reputation as one of the most imaginative and exciting writers of our time.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Magical Realism, Fantasy, Literary Fiction, Short Story Collection, Contemporary

222 pages, Hardcover

First published August 13, 2013

About the author

Aimee Bender is the author of the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures. Her work has been widely anthologized and has been translated into ten languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

baby's first (aimee) bender!!

and now i see what all the fuss is about. she has a real flair for the fantastic, for the magical fairytale quickstep where suddenly a story about apples becomes a story about sexual assault. it's dream-logic perfection.

like all good fairytales, the magical elements are just glossing over those painful universal realities we don't like to examine too closely: the sorrow of a couple ruining themselves, the unwillingness to look too closely at our loved ones, the lies told to avoid confrontation, the gratitude of a necessary favor that still leaves a hollowness.

and she manages to just pepper this collection with perfect observations:

That's the thing with handmade items. They still have the person's mark on them, and when you hold them, you feel less alone. This is why everyone who eats a Whopper leaves a little more depressed then they were when they came in. Nobody cooked that burger.

there's a darkness in these stories, and it is unsettling. you can't just move on to the next story with anything like a clean slate. you have this pall hanging over you, and it haunts you from one story to the next.

she has such a knack for voicing the unvoiceable:

…it is brutal to imagine the idea of meeting a new person. Going through the same routine. Saying the same phrases I have now said many times; the big statements, the grand revelations about my childhood and character. The cautious revealings of insecurities. I have said them already, and they sit now in the minds of those people who are out living lives I have no access to anymore. A while ago, this sharing was tremendous; now the idea of facing a new person and speaking the same core sentences seems like a mistake, an error of integrity…The next person I love, I will sit across from in silence. We will have to learn it from each other some other way.

i don't feel like i can do this book justice right now, so i will just list some of the standouts:

Lemonade is one of the best, and also the one that i am most afraid of. it's a panicked stream of consciousness in the mind of a highly sensitive girl and her terror at how she comes across to others to the extent that she is blind to how she is perceived by those she wants to be close to.

Tiger Mending, which all i can say to that is this

Wordkeepers which is the funniest, but also the truest and softest to my heart.

Faces, which is just pure poignant delight. that ending… oofa.

Americca - another heavy-magic story that kills me with its ability to pare itself down into all that brutal childhood wonder and self-imposed structure and that whole part with the octopus cap is probably the best example of child-think i have ever read.

i am definitely going to backtrack and read her older titles.

not my finest review, but i still have difficulty reviewing story collections, even one that i enjoyed as much as this one.

come to my blog!

[Jennifer Tam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m only about a 1/3 of the way through this collection of short stories and I’m not normally a short story kind of reader but these are blowing me away and making me think - love her style of writing - my rating may change as I read the rest of the book but somehow I doubt it - can’t wait to read more of her writing

[Connie Cox · Rating 1 out of 5]

My fellow go to reviewers were so split on Ms. Bender's book The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake that I was having trouble deciding whether to take the plunge and give it a try. Imagine my delight when I won a copy of The Color Master her collection of short stories. I thought that this would entice me to go further.

As much as I wanted to "get" her writing and embrace it.....it just wasn't there for me. I loved her lyrical prose, and the build up she delivers., the promise of a wonderful story and I found myself getting excited, thinking....this is great, then getting to the end of a story and saying, "huh, what was that? What just happened?" I felt so lost. I felt like I did not have whatever gene it is that I needed to understand her point. Satire? Fantasy? What?

I am sorry....I wanted to love you....and your stories.....

I do want to say thank you for the copy that I won through the Gooodreads giveaways.....I wish I could have appreciated it more. Just not my bailiwick perhaps!

[Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Goodreads and Vintage/Anchor Books for the review copy.

This was so unbelievably better than I expected. Each story stands alone as a unique gem and there are absolutely no missteps.

Imagine being blindfolded, put on a plane and told you were going somewhere you’ll never guess. That’s the world these stories live in. Almost every sentence is a blind step into the unknown. I was amazed at the unpredictability of each moment and the sheer guts and freedom Bender uses to create her worlds. Her writing almost seemed possessed by the great fairy tale masters, Aesop or Hans Christian Anderson.

My favorite stories were “Faces”, “Bad Return”, and the “Color Master”.

In “Faces”, a young boy discovers he has a disorder that prevents him from recognizing facial expressions and emotions. He sees faces, but he can’t distinguish them from others. The expressions he sees, even those of soldiers dying in pain, are flat and invariable. But, this is simply the plot of the story. Underneath, Bender illuminates the importance of empathy and how necessary it is to each of our lives. You can’t have fable-like stories without a moral, and the moral of many of these is that we can’t truly understand an individual until we’ve seen life through their eyes. And in Bender’s stories, the individual life matters and is at the core of understanding. How does each person see another person? What’s it like to have compassion in abundance, or in contrast, empathetic limitations?

I think “Bad Return” might’ve been my favorite because, as I’ve said before, Bender surprises with each sentence. In one moment, you’re with Arlene, the main character, philosophizing in her apartment about her relationships with her roommate and friends. Next thing you know, Arlene, for some unknown reason, is traipsing off with a band of college protestors, and they all end up in a field, naked. I learned in an acting class once that characters should always have a motivation for their choices. It is unclear what motivates Arlene at first, but this story works because she ends up meeting an old man in a home next to the field that leads her to the self-awareness she was lacking. Bender uses magic realism in many of her stories, but in this one, the devise is used not for the fantastical, but for the purpose of showing the main character the meaning of life. Without supernatural intervention, Arlene would continue to flounder and never truly discover her purpose or what truly matters in life.

Finally, the title story, “The Color Master”, is like the best of fairy tales, and a story that I could see being told for hundreds of years. It’s similar to the writing of Karen Russell in Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories, but more universal in clarity and imagination. I won’t go into the plot, because I think it’s important for a reader to have their own experience with this story, but this too gathers an array of compassion and empathy.

This is just a truly fun piece of literature to read.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've loved Aimee Bender's short stories for years, including The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories and Willful Creatures. I keep meaning to read her novels, and will get to them someday, but her stories are often just so beautiful and sad and magical... this volume is no different, and I enjoyed it very much.

A few of my favorites:

The Red Ribbon - about a couple, with a very sad ending. Wow.
I also loved the line "Her body was made up of the wrong chickens."

Wordkseepers - I guess you just shouldn't date your neighbors!

A State of Variance - again for the ending, so I can't say much.

I haven't read Bender's stories in seven years, and I remember them being full of magic. In this volume I feel like Bender is often choosing to take the magic away when her characters need it most, something I thought had a greater impact to me as the reader.

I did receive an electronic review copy of these stories from NetGalley in return for an honest review. I'm never obligated to review a book much less lie about what I think. It is rare for any book to receive five stars from me, review copy or not!

[Stuart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whew! A breath of fresh air. I've been on a bad streak as of late. I've been forcing myself to get through novels. With one of them, I got so frustrated that I just threw the novel against my dresser with 10 percent left to go. "That's it," I thought to myself. "I don't need to know any more about these dreadful people." These books have all been written exceedingly well. All that style. Zippo heart. Contemporary fiction tends to have a problem with assuming that humanity is the same as sentimentality. Also many of its practitioners seem to think that their unhappiness needs to be shared with the world. Trust me, it doesn't.

Whew! Got that rant out. Sorry about that. Now about this collection of stories.

They really are delightful, just what I needed. Who else today writes like Aimee Bender? Nobody. There's a crazy mix of influences here including European folktales, Singer, Raymond Carver and who knows what else. These dream infused stories are full of playfulness and joy. Sure, there are disturbing passages, but whose dreams aren't full of disturbing events? Somehow Ms. Bender uses precise American vernacular and simple language to create complex, psychological landscapes. If you want realism in your fiction, stay away. But for me, this is as good as the contemporary American short story gets.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) Bender is best known for The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. This is the second collection of her stories that I’ve read. Most have a touch of the bizarre to them – a tiny tweak to normal life – but some are set in completely alternate worlds. One character experiences extreme face blindness; another deludes himself that he was a famously vicious Nazi during the Second World War. Seamstresses take on odd tasks like repairing endangered animals or, in the title story, creating a dress that resembles the moon and embodies female anger. In “Appleless,” vigilantes punish a girl who won’t eat apples, while “The Devourings” is a dark riff on Shrek in which a woman comes to terms with her ogre husband’s innate violence.

A few favorites were “A State of Variance,” in which a character can’t seem to avoid perfect facial symmetry no matter how he tries to mar his natural beauty, “The Doctor and the Rabbi,” a philosophical conversation between an ill rabbi and her atheist-leaning parishioner, and “The Red Ribbon” (which draws on the same source material as Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch”), about a bored housewife who starts acting out sexual fantasies to try to save her marriage.

Bender deploys a good mixture of voices and protagonists, though at least four of the 15 stories felt unnecessary to me. Her approach is similar to Kelly Link’s and Karen Russell’s, but I’ve failed to get on with their surreal stories before – Bender’s writing is that bit more accessible. I’d recommend her to fans of stories by Amy Bloom and Sarah Hall.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Maciek · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked The Color Master better than the only other collection by Aimee Bender that I've read, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, but only slightly. It's an interesting comparison - her first collection posed along with the most recent - but it also yields an interesting result: my opinion on the two books is pretty much identical.

While I do appreciate Aimee Bender's flair for surreal imagery and ideas, what trouble me is the common thread which runs through her work - the lack of actual stories. When I read a collection of stories, I want to read stories - not surreal concepts which in the end don't mean anything. Why should we care about the girl who doesn't eat apples, if she and her companion are nothing more than paper constructs? The stories resemble exercises from a writing workshop, written in a way to resemble something that Richard Brautigan would write back in the 1960'. But who remembers Brautigan now? Most of the stories left me with little else than a haze, which is very quickly to dissolve. A shame, considering the author's talent for putting words together - if only there was more to that!

[Taury · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very odd book!

[Stuti Rai · Rating 4 out of 5]

The past few days, which are months in reader-not-reading time, I'd had real trouble getting into books that I'd normally like. Some were too dramatic, others too romantic. Prose too simple, too florid. And then I happened across this anthology, the cover of which had me seduced me in, the title that exorcised my doubts and the stories, writing that captivate me beyond those pages, and will continue to haunt me.

Bender writes in the simplest, non-fussy words that somehow, in their arrangement, turn out most magical and surreal. Bender writes in the prettiest, summer-dress-type proses that hide something far darker underneath. Her stories carry disturbing and sinister undertones that belie the fairy tales shimmering on the surface. That's the only commonality in the stories and it gives cohesion to the anthology; the stories that would have been in discord but for that malice inside.

Comfort and fear rose together inside him. Like standing in the middle of a meadow, where no one had his back.

No one expects a tree to be symmetrical at all. It opens its arms, in its unevenness, and he, a butterfly, flew inside.

Funnily enough, these two lines are from the stories I liked the least, which is still far too much.

But it's not just that. She picks out the most honest and trivial truths of our everyday lives, the ones that trouble us all the sucking time and we can't even identify them. The ones we unknowingly shun; the ones that we aren't even aware we have, until someone, say Aimee Bender, comes along and points it out to us.

The stories have a flair about them, a sadness and a poetry.

Appleless : This one is the first story and the shortest of off; it's more of an introduction and/or warning into/about what's to come. It's about obsession and how it morphs, that it can't stay innocuous for long. It terrified me the most and is one of my favorites of the collection. It's appalling but it reads like a... well, you see:

I once knew a girl who wouldn't eat apples. She wove her way walking around groves and orchards. She didn't even like to look at them... We sit in the orchard, cross-legged, and when they fall off the tress into our outstretched hands, we bite right in... She's so beautiful on this day, her skin as wide and open as a river. We could swim right down her.

The Red Ribbon & Tiger Beding : I have no bloody clue what to say about these two, frankly. The ending of the former was sad and I love those last, parting lines. The latter one was about bitter truth and secrets that you're better off not knowing, or that what I interpreted.

Faces : The kid here doesn't see faces, just features. Make of that what you will but it was creepy, creepy all round.

On that Saturday Afternoon : Here we are shown in a moment of indulgence that things change and they do so easily. I love how it laid bare the truth and repetition of relationships.

The Fake Nazi & A State of Variance : These two stories start with an old man and a woman, respectively but end up being entirely about someone else.

Lemonade : It's the story of a teenaged girl, blinded by a fervent need to please. I wasn't too keen on it when I first read it, but since then, it has stood out the most to me, besides Appleless and is one of my favorites.

Bad Return : This one is of my least favorite, by which I mean that I didn't enjoy it to the same degree as I did the others and that is not a reflection on its quality at all.

The Doctor and The Rabbi & Wordkeepers : To these two, I say:

I am a man, man, man, man
Up, up in the air
And I run around, round, round, round
this down town and act like I don't care.
So when you see me flying by the planet's moon,
You don't need to explain if everything's changed
Just know I'm just like you.

Just for the heck of it, really.

Origin Lessons : Best science lesson by far, truly.
The universe began in a veil. Like a bride.

The Color Master : And I fell in love with this story, bit by bit, color by color. It's a prequel to the fable "Donkeyskin". It's about that tailors that help shape the princess's future and her emancipation from her father. I loved it, I loved it, I loved it!!!

Americca : So what I said about the previous stories? Yeah, pretty much applies here. I was so fascinated by the childhood, and the sense of fright and miracle that fills those days. And the fact that she let it linger on.

The Devourings : Damn, I'm sounding like a broken record but here goes: I really, really, really, really liked it! There are an ogre and a woman, but more than them, it's a story on their bond as a couple and look how it ends:

This is the spell of the cake. And the darkness, eating light, and again light, and again light, lifted.



Aimee Bender, did anybody ever tell you that I'm in love with you? No? People are assholes.

And *ahem* cover, my preciousssssss, come here, my precioussssssssss...

Review copy provided by the publishers.

[Jessada_K · Rating 4 out of 5]

ชอบหลายเรื่องในเล่มนี้ ส่วนบางเรื่องเราก็รู้สึกว่าเฉยๆมากๆ แต่รวมๆแล้ว มีเรื่องที่ชอบมากกว่าที่ไม่ชอบ และเราอยากจัดให้เอมี่ เบ็นเดอร์ เป็นนักเขียนหญิงอีกคนที่เราชื่นชอบ

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

These stories exemplify the now classic structure of contemporary literary fiction: great waves of prose that crest in moments of pure poetry, built on symbolism, introspection, and, above all, angst. Bender re-imagines her own existential crises as outside events, and whether the story features ogres, high school girls, or sex, an overwhelming feeling remains that this is about the author's life. My two favorite stories were Lemonade, about the aforementioned high school girls, where the angst is most plain and honest, and The Color Master, which is a strikingly beautiful and flawlessly imagined fable of master and apprentice dyers making fantastical garments for an evil duke. Both stories, and all of Bender's best writing, meld perfect prose with a dark and unavoidable sadness.

I found myself comparing my favorite stories to the best contemporary fiction (The Tiger's Wife), and my least favorite to the most uninspiring (Great House, for example). There is nothing here beyond the scope of the autobiographical, shrouded as it usually is these days in the near-academic execution of high literary style, and that is to the benefit of these stories, executed with a precise concentration that gazes back as they are read, unyielding and unlocking.

(As a contrast, I am now reading Karen Russell's new collection, which could not be more different in scope and style, even though it supposedly would sit next to this on the new releases shelf. Russell writes far beyond herself by creating characters and worlds and letting the emotion come from them. Neither is necessarily a superior form; for instance, Bender never seems as glib or distracting as Russell can be, whereas Russell sometimes reaps benefits from taking her characters and ideas less seriously.)

[Oriana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hooray hooray for a new Bender! I may have failed at getting a proof of MaddAddam, but I got this beauty in my hot little hands, which is good consolation.

And it's good, it is; but that's trickerous, because truly, there are only a few standouts ("The Color Master," "Devourings"), but they are so spectacular that they cancel out the rest. So when I think about this book I will remember a cake that keeps regenerating itself, shaved opals the exact color of the moon, a woman who marries an ogre, and other such twisty fantastical bits of modernized fable, which is what I always associate with Aimee anyway.

The rest of the stories range from surprisingly sexy, to regular but interesting (there's one where a war protest turns into an orgy which turns into a mass mugging; that one is pretty rad), to the short crummy worst kind of Saturday Night Live short story, which you know started with like one exchange or thought or character trait that the author then stre-e-e-e-etched out into a painful thing much longer than the joke or idea deserved. You know? I mean, story collections are always uneven, I get that. But some of these—man. Calling them "filler" would be generous.

So, on balance? The good ones are so good as to obscure the bad, and even if you average it all together it still beats the incredibly disappointing Sadness of Lemon Cake novel. So I will remember this fondly, and will salivate with longing at the next, when it comes, although at this point I'm getting used to being mildly disappointed by her.

[Nadine Rose Larter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can I mark a book five stars purely because my own ideas have been going haywire since I started reading it? That seems fair, doesn't it? I have such a love for Aimee Bender despite the fact that I'm not nearly quirky enough to understand half of what she is saying. She gives me pause, though. The kind of pause that is hopeful with regards to my own self and my own abilities. I have lead a life of such rules. Always. This is what you have to do to be an acceptable girl. An acceptable scholar. An acceptable human. All the wrong things I have blamed on myself: my unacceptableness, my inability to grasp the rules. The rules of how you should be in order to be acceptable. But all of Aimee is just bonkers a bit. And if Aimee can go around being bonkers and making up her own rules and just writing whatever the hell story she feels like writing even though sometimes they don't make sense even when they do make sense. Well then maybe I can give up this list of rules and just do what I want to do too, right? I love you, Aimee. Thank you.

[Kristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a strong collection of short stories, however, not strong enough to revisit over and over. Ms. Bender fabulously captures the absurdity and surrealism of human interaction; she writes well. Some of her stories in this volume become too meandering or not meandering enough, though. The title story, “The Color Master” is by far the best and, combined with the final story, “The Devourings” redeemed this collection to 4 stars for me. Both stories are included in other anthologies that I own so I will pass this volume along to somebody who will enjoy it more than me. I will absolutely read more by Ms. Bender and I’m glad I tried this one!

[Vonia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The four stars is primarily due to a select few of my very favorites from this collection. The Red Ribbon (The role play of prostitution between a married couple results in the wife being unable to have meaningful sex without payment ever again), Appleless (A magical world where apples forever fall from trees in an orchard), The Doctor & The Rabbi (Touches on the idea of God/Atheism, waiting in a "queue" for prayers: "The best way I can think to describe it,” she said, “is the way, when you’re driving on the freeway at night, how everyone can see the moon in their window. Every car, on the road. Every car feels the moon is following that car. Even in the other direction, right? Everyone in that entire hemisphere can see the moon and think it is there for them, is following where they go..."), Americca (A family is graced with the magical appearance of random gifts, such as an Octopus hat that a child really wanted & got from her mother, but that one was the wrong fit; "fancy" lobster bisque, extra towels... ), & my favorite by far, The Color Master (A world where an elite team of individuals create colors in an elaborate process, like shoes the color of rocks, a dress of the moon, then one of the sun, finally one the color of the sky; the moon must incorporate that reflective color that is not quite a color nor quite a reflection of a color even, the sun has that quality of being the light in the darkness, bright enough to illuminate but still necessary to squint a little, the sky a radiant blue that still shimmers in a fusion of shades).

I have always had mixed feelings regarding this particular type of magical realism, the other author coming to mind being Karen Russell. The type I am referring to is when it is downright weird. My favorite magical realism is the playful, magical, whimsical type, such as Sarah Addison Allen. The two fore mentioned authors, however, tend to write some stories that are a little more weird than I like; also more supernatural, "scary" characters & elements that I tend to shy from (vampires, ogres, etcetera). That being said, the stories in this collection that tended to be more cute/whimsical were amazing. I love this author much more than Karen Russell in that her quality of writing far outshines, in my opinion.

The way she describes these magical fantastical worlds of her imagination easily paint the picture right before my very eyes. The other thing is that all her stories, even the ones I do not necessarily like, are not really the magical, fun stories they appear to be. Always, at the core, is some emotional, insightful idea about how we as individuals see the world, feel about ourselves, interact with our close ones... About how we survive. My favorite quote from this collection illuminates this perfectly, although the story itself is, in my opinion, one of the weaker ones (Girl encourages to make friends to be gay as she watches, convincing them she is participating in the embarrassment in her own way; that they are sharing the moment):

"Even though I am making steady proclamations about who I will go for next, and why, and how it will all be different, it is difficult to imagine the idea of meeting a new person. Going through the same routine. Saying the same phrases I have now said many times; the big statements, the grand revelations about my childhood and character. The cautious revealings of insecurities. I have said them already, and they sit now in the minds of those people who are out living lives I have no access to anymore. A while ago, this sharing was tremendous; now the idea of facing a new person and speaking the same core sentences seems like a mistake, an error of integrity…The next person I love, I will sit across from in silence. We will have to learn it from each other some other way."


The image of The Color Master, shuffling between the bins, creating these colors remained with me long after I finished reading. And that is the mark of an excellent author.

[Ana · Rating 1 out of 5]

Extremamente decepcionada com este livro...
Gosto muito de contos e pequenas histórias, mas coisas que façam sentido, que tenham principio, meio e fim, que nos contem alguma coisa...
Estes contos fizeram-me lembrar "Alice no País das Maravilhas" no sentido em que a maioria das histórias são "nonsense", coisas tão disparatadas que não fazem sentido nenhum.
Queria muito gostar, até porque acho a capa lindíssima, mas não consegui, não gostei.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice selection of stories

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hmmmm...this collection of short stories by Aimee Bender was harder for me to get into. It took me longer to read for a start and that's because I read a few which were amazing (Appleless and The Red Ribbon which is one of my favourite short stories - honestly, Bender has a ridiculously imaginative and tender way with words. She causes your heart to ache as she presents you with broken lives and failing marriages) which were then followed by a few I didn't much care for (Faces, Lemonade and Origin Lessons).

I actually found that some of her longer short stories such as Faces and Bad Return, despite being well written, didn't really do an awful lot for me. I read them, I (mostly) enjoyed them but they didn't leave me feeling anything particularly strong, and that is a great shame.

Having read her other story collections (Willful Creatures and The Girl in the Flammable Skirt), I have to pronounce The Color Master as the weakest one. The stories in this collection still contain the beautiful language and scintillating descriptions Bender is known for, however, I would have to say that a good third of the stories collected here left me feeling indifferent.

My favourite stories from The Color Master are as follows:

The Red Ribbon - a story about a woman who convinces her husband to pay her for sex. I actually understand the need behind this since it's about a woman who needs to find herself, her identity, to feel like she has earned something, to feel worthwhile. A very powerful and moving story which ends perfectly.

Tiger Mending - a very subtle yet powerful story about two sisters who are taken to Asia, where one of the sisters' job is to mend tigers. A deep and affecting story which will stay with you for a little while afterwards.

On a Saturday Afternoon - a story about a woman watching her two male friends become intimate under her command. Bender's elegant prose really makes this piece shine. After reading this, you will be glowing.

The Doctor and the Rabbi - this was a beautifully written and wonderfully executed story where the power of dialogue is propelled to new heights. As with most of Bender's work, she is able to move her readers by what her character's fail to say. A singular story.

The Color Master - the title story and I can see why. Possibly my second favourite short story from the collection (after The Red Ribbon). Full of magical realism, pure escapism and reads like a fairy tale. Bender's nuance for detail, in capturing the fragility of humans is present in its finest form here, and reminds us how special certain individuals are. Magical.

Americca - this was a slightly strange story, and I'm not fully sure whether I understood it completely but that doesn't hide the fact that I can appreciate Bender's unique writing and singular storytelling. A story that I shall definitely re-read again - it's like a fishing hook which keeps on reeling you in and the last line is heart-breaking.

The Devourings - a story about a female human and a male ogre who are married. Again, an incredibly strange story which reads like a fairy tale/fable. One of the most vivid stories in the collection because of what happens in it and the cake in it could have a story of it's own. A unique and unusual read.

Overall, The Color Master is a great read with some poetic descriptions and beautifully written dialogue. If you're new to Bender's work however, I suggest you read Willful Creatures first because that collection will honestly blow you away like a dandelion seed in the wind. Magical realism in its purest and most seductive form.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bender is a very interesting writer with a wonderful imagination. Surprisingly, because I tend to associate her with magical realism, not all these stories had magical realism ion them. Of course many of them did. My favorites were the title story, The Colormaster and The wordkeepers, but the story I liked best was the one with the tigers, and I have no idea why. There was really only one story in this collection that I did not like and I won't tell you which one that was.

A good collection of stories, a bit of magic to perk up ones day.

[Misha · Rating 4 out of 5]

THIS:

"In the mornings I write long circular journal entries when I wake up. Too early. Before work. But even though I am making steady proclamations about who I will go for next, and why, and how it will all be different, it is brutal to imagine the idea of meeting a new person. Going through the same routine. Saying the same phrases I have now said many times: the big statements, the grand revelations about my childhood and character. The cautious revealings of insecurities. I have said them already, and they sit now in the minds of those people who are out living lives I have no access to anymore. A while ago, this sharing was tremendous; now the idea of facing a new person and speaking the same core sentences seems like a mistake, an error of integrity. Surely it is not good for my own mind to make myself into a speech like that. The only major untouched field of discussion will have to do with this feeling, this tiredness, this exact speech.
The next person I love, I will sit across from in silence. We will have to learn it from each other some other way." (60)

[Jenna Hazzard · Rating 2 out of 5]

To preface this review, I did not finish this book. I read to about page 110 before giving up.

I picked this book up for a couple of dollars somewhere, and to be honest, I'm glad that I didn't spend much more than that. I can see why people enjoy Aimee Bender and to a certain degree, I also enjoyed her writing. She uses some interesting metaphors. For example, "Her hair is so long and wheatlike you could bake it into bread." However, I tired of this flowery style quickly. Perhaps the book just wasn't to my taste (I prefer cleaner, more minimalist prose).

I think I could have gotten over my style preferences, if the plots of the short stories were a bit more focused. Some stories were better than others, but a lot of them seemed a bit aimless with their plot. Overall, this collection wasn't for me.

[T J · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're a willing reader, you'll go everywhere with Aimee Bender. Readers might feel like writers for a bit here, like we're the kid sitting on a grownup's lap while the grownup is driving. For a moment we can glimpse through the windshield of the story. I'm going back for more.

[Rachael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good short stories are hard to come by and these are an artform.

I loved this collection, I love Aimee Bender.

I went and bought her other story collections straight away.

Aimee - you are the story master, please never stop writing.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've never read an Aimee Bender book, you may now pause and enjoy that wonderful sense of relief that comes over you whenever you discover a new writer and realize that she's got four or five books out and probably many more to come and you have not, as you'd feared, run out of good books to read after all.

The Color Master is probably her best book yet. It has a delightfully trippy fairy-tale vibe that will transport you to some dreamy world you won't want to leave--although you'll feel vaguely uncomfortable about how badly you want to stay there, like Dorothy in a field of opium poppies.

Speaking of opium--let's get on to the cocktail. A magical, fanciful, surrealist book like The Color Master just begs for some absinthe, what with its other-wordly wonderfulness and its dreamy frothiness and its vaguely illicit air. I also like absinthe for Aimee Bender books because absinthe changes before your eyes, like a sorcerer's trick. Add water and it goes from a clear green spirit to something cloudy, milky, and pale like the moon, thanks to the transformative effect of water on those oily flavor molecules produced by the plants absinthe is made from. In the presence of water, they break out of suspension and clump together, making themselves visible where they were previously invisible. Weird, huh? Just like an Aimee Bender story.

So here's your recipe. If characters in fairy tales drank cocktails, this is what they'd drink. You'll find something like it in The Official Mixer's Manual, but check out Erik Ellestad's take on it:

Sea Fizz

1.5 oz absinthe
1/2 lemon, freshly squeezed
1 egg white, freshly laid
1 tsp simple syrup (equal parts sugar & water, heated until the sugar melts and allowed to cool)
Soda water

Shake the first 4 ingredients in a shaker without ice, then add ice and shake some more. Really shake this drink! Then strain into a cocktail glass and top with soda water.

Note: If you've never had absinthe, it tastes like licorice. It's legal now and good liquor stores have many nice options. If you'd rather use pastis or Herbsaint, cut back on the simple syrup. Also, a little dash of gin would not hurt this drink at all.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

It pains me to give an Aimee Bender collection only 3 stars out of 5, but that's where her new collection has left me. Like Karen Russell's latest collection, The Color Master draws the distinction of showing a new direction in Bender's writing, an effort to deviate slightly from the stories that she's known for and try new things. And like Karen Russell's latest collection, I don't think Bender quite succeeds as well as she hoped.

The best stories here are, unfortunately, stories that prolific short story readers could have discovered in other anthology collections - "Tiger Mending" in Best American Non-Required Reading, "The Color Master" in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, and "On a Saturday Afternoon" (and maybe a few others) from her own website. Instead of a proliferation of her usual darkly magical stories revolve around bizarre set ups that are mostly just a jumping off point to get into a tangentially related conversation. "Lemonade" reads like a longer, less kinetic version of her story "Jynx" from Willful Creatures. Stories like "Faces" and "The Fake Nazi" start out with a strange premise, then linger in odd, mundane details and never fully tie their plots together the way she does with "The Meeting" and "The Motherfucker."

Part of these feelings come from a slightly selfish stand point - Bender's earlier stories weren't broken, so why fix them? I should say that many of these stories were enjoyable, and the ones that weren't were hardly terrible - Bender is still great with a slight, comical phrasing, and there's a level of nuance to the simplest details. As a huge admirer of Bender's writing, I am glad that she's trying new things. I just hope, come her next collection, she's more successfully combined the emotional subtlety of The Color Master with the darkly comic energy of Willful Creatures.

[KWinks · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not a short story fan. I really dislike becoming emotionally involved with characters and then letting them go (usually in obscurity) after 40 pages. Uh-uh. Give me a novel any day. That said, Aimee Bender does not write short stories, but dreams and I love them. She makes me question things I never thought to question before, and plants ideas in my head. How important, really, are faces? What will be the impact of a culture that is losing its words? I didn't know I cared about these things, but through dreams I realize I really do.
Each of these stories takes you someplace very strange and then smacks you around while you are there. Because of that, I try to read them with long pauses in between each tale in order to let them sink in and to question what I just gleamed from them.
I could not help but assign each of these stories a color as I read them. I may have guessed them correctly, or I may be way off base. Who knows? The Devourings, freshest in my mind, was very green. The Doctor and the Rabbi? Blood red.
I don't think I could pick a favorite here. I enjoyed all of them in one way or another. Lemonade meant something important to me because I have two teen girls. That may not have been the point of the story, it doesn't matter, I know what it meant to me.
Americca amazed me. I think I could read it over and over again and still not want to leave (it was orangy yellow, btw, for curry).
I highly recommend this set of tales for someone who is in the mood for something amazing, and there is enough here for those who love retellings of fairy tales (although these are original tales).

[Rhiannon Johnson · Rating 1 out of 5]

"In this collection, Bender’s unique talents sparkle brilliantly in stories about people searching for connection through love, sex, and family—while navigating the often painful realities of their lives. A traumatic event unfolds when a girl with flowing hair of golden wheat appears in an apple orchard, where a group of people await her. A woman plays out a prostitution fantasy with her husband and finds she cannot go back to her old sex life. An ugly woman marries an ogre and struggles to decide if she should stay with him after he mistakenly eats their children. Two sisters travel deep into Malaysia, where one learns the art of mending tigers who have been ripped to shreds."

I appreciate Bender's style and tried to keep an open mind, but I personally did not like the stories. Billed as a collection of grown-up fairy tales, I was hoping for something racy and dark but with a lesson. Like last year's release of Philip Pullman's Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm but for adults. I found the stories unsettling and vague. To be truthful, I only read the first four stories and then gave up. I love a non-conformist style (House of Leaves is one of my favorite books) but this just left me scratching my head.

[Alena · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful way to begin my 2014 reading, Aimee Bender's collection of stories satisfied all my desires. Powerful, dark, magical, engaging and filled with unforgettable images.

Not surprisingly, I was most moved by the stories containing magical realism, especially "The Color Master," "The Devourings," and "Appleless." Bender has an amazing ability to immerse readers in an alternate universe while making it seem all too real. These stories touch me emotionally and their "truths" are more real to me than a story set in my own backyard.

I was pleasantly surprised that her more realistic tales held the same kind of resonance for me. "The Red Ribbon," "The Fake Nazi" and "The Doctor and the Rabbi" are excellent examples of short stories that stand alone as full-bodied, if incredibly lonely, works of fiction.

I've determined that I will pretty much follow Aimee Bender wherever she goes. Immensely satisfying.

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just love Aimee Bender. I've enjoyed all of her books, but particularly her short stories. Unlike some of the previous books, which I've devoured in a day or two, these stories were better read one or two at a time followed by a break. I've been reading them off-and-on for nearly two months. Some of these were less magic-filled and fairy like than her best stories. Bender shines most when her stories take a turn for the strange. The woman who married an ogre, the title story of a clothier that produces dyes that capture the essence of rocks or the moon or the sun, and the woman who couldn't stand apples. Highly recommended for those who enjoy Kelly Link, Ben Loory, or Charles de Lint.