Willful creatures Book

Reading Aimee Bender is like waking up one morning to find yourself swimming inside a terracotta bowl of guacamole and accepting it. You pull yourself out of the bowl, hoisting yourself over the lip, towel off and head to work. Maybe you catch yourself longing for the green smoothness of the morning as you sit through a meeting. Wondering if it will happen again. It does. Only the next morning you are fished out by a spoon. Weird.

My favorite stories here are "The End of the Line," "Motherfucker," and "Dearth." The language is beautiful and every story contains elements of the unaccountable. Children born with heads like pumpkins, like irons, potatoes that magically reappear day after day, little people who are caught and kept as pets. One begins to expect the unexpected. Perhaps that's life lesson number one.