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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Tag Archives: Aimee Bender

Episode 176: Tom Lucas!

24 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Aimee Bender, Dallas Woodburn, Eraserhead Press, Fiction, Leather to the Corinthians, New Bizarro Author Series, Pax Titanus, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Tom Lucas

Episode 176 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I interview bizarro fiction writer Tom Lucas,

Tom Lucas

plus Dallas Woodburn writes about how reading Aimee Bender’’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake changed her life.

Dallas Woodburn

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Pax TitanusLeather for the CorinthiansThe Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

NOTES

Horror Movie Poetry Night 2The Drunken Odyssey: A Podcast About the Writing Life presents another evening of verse inspired by that most poetic of film genres: horror!

Featuring

Mark Purcell
Teege Braune
Anna King
Vincent Crampton
Genevieve Anna Tyrrell
Tom Lucas
Susan Fallows
& your host, John King.

Absinthe ceremony to follow?

October 28, 2015

Writer’s Atelier (336 Grove Avenue, Winter Park, FL)

See facebook event page here.


Episode 176 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Buzzed Books #6: Writing (Not-So-) Magical Realism

10 Tuesday Sep 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Recommendation

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Tags

Aimee Bender, Alise Hamilton, Buzzed Books, The Color Master: Stories

Buzzed Books #6 by Alise Hamilton

Writing (not-so)Magical Realism

The Color Master

Within these fifteen stories, a girl sews the stripes back onto tigers, a boy can’t recognize faces, a teacher attempts to explain the origins of the universe, and mysterious, yet ordinary, objects keep appearing in one American family’s home. Aimee Bender is well known as a fabulist, magic realist writer and one of the masters of the short story form. The Color Master is Aimee Bender doing what Aimee Bender does best.

There seems to me to be less world creating in this collection than in some of her earlier work. Instead, the stories are often presented with individual magical elements attributed to particular characters (who are living in the world as we know it), more Bender’s bestselling novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. In fact, a few stories in the collection—“Lemonade,” “The Red Ribbon,” and “On a Saturday Afternoon”—while quirky, lack any traditional fantastic elements at all. Yet, like Bender’s strictly surrealist fiction, these stories are told in a style often attributed to fairy tales. The plotting is face-paced and the language is matter-of-fact, but the overall effect of the stories is that they are weighty and important; despite their quirks, Bender’s stories feel classic.

“Origin Lessons,” is a four-page story told in the plural first person from a group of school children eager to know how it all began, origins of life and the beginning of the universe. The story, again, is not does not literally contain “magic,” but the telling is whimsical and elements of space—its expanding and accelerating, matter and radiation—so foreign to the students it may as well be spells and wizards. In the story, the students struggle to comprehend the rules of the universe by comparing them to familiar images and symbols: suitcases and brides. The story, then, becomes a larger metaphor for storytelling itself. Aren’t writers all trying to find the familiar images with which to express love, grief, desire…all the greater elements of life? Isn’t our limited language at once frustrating and beautiful?

Pair with: 95 beer steins at the ogre tavern

Find THE COLOR MASTER now at your local independent bookstore or buy online at Powells.com.

___________

Alise Hamilton

Alise Hamilton (Episode 7, essay) earned her MFA from Lesley University and holds a BFA in creative writing, literature, and publishing from Emerson College. Her short fiction appeared in the Francesca Lia Block-edited anthology Love Magick.

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