AIMEE BENDER
Aimee Bender is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, An Invisible Sign of My Own, Willful Creatures, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, The Color Master, and most recently, The Butterfly Lampshade, longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and The Paris Review, among other publications. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes. We asked Aimee to share 5 of her favorite books.
The Plague by Albert Camus. This is a recent addition, read last year for the obvious reasons. But I loved how much humanity is packed into this slim volume, and how Camus seems to play out so many different ways a person might cope with calamity, illness, loss, lockdown. I found it very moving and consider it a kind of moral guide, too.
Beloved by Toni Morrison. I reread this book after she died, and it was almost shocking to see what an influence it had been on me and many writers I admire; I had ingested it fully. Morrison writes with a bone-deep confidence, making the choices that are right for her book and her characters and there is extraordinary freedom in this, both in narrative movement and in characterization.
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens is one I return to. I often have no idea what he’s talking about, but some line will hook me in, push me to find out more, to understand, to wonder, to probe. I have memorized a couple of these poems and living with the words actually thrilled me.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro builds a world in which lives a particular feeling. Each book of his imprints the feeling upon me. This one was painful, and I felt like I was falling through space by the end, but I also found it stunningly, almost unbearably human.
All the short stories by Alice Munro—Runaway is a good example. I’m in a longterm book group and every now and then we decide to talk an Alice Munro short story and it takes two hours and the conversation takes several turns and so much is revealed along the way.