The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is a collection of short stories by American novelist Aimee Bender. It was originally published in 1998 by Doubleday, receiving a spot on the New York Times Notable Books the same year. [1] The book follows stories of young women with unlikely dilemmas.
 | |
| Author | Aimee Bender |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Published | Doubleday |
Publication date | 1998 |
| Publication place | United States of America |
| ISBN | 0385492154 |
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is a book that showcases a collection of short stories that do not intertwine in any way. The characters and setting from one story are completely separate from the next. The only common link between the 16 short stories of the book is the recurrence of twisted and unusual conflict. These conflicts drive each story until there is nothing left to get out of them.
Aimee Bender's contemporary fiction is often categorized as surreal, magical, and even phantasmagoric. [2] All of these descriptions can be clearly recognized throughout The Girl in the Flammable Skirt as everyday things and occurrences such as objects, relationships, and loss are turned grotesque and satirical. [3] Bender creates vivid imagery with minimal words as she is straight to the point and does not show anything more than necessary. [4]
"The Rememberer" follows a wife losing her husband to reverse evolution as he goes from man to salamander. [5]
"Call My Name" exhibits a lonely woman's adventure in craving attention and sex from a man who would prefer to watch game shows on the television. [5]
"What You Left in the Ditch" shows the inner and outer conflict a wife experiences when her husband returns home from the war without his lips. [5]
"The Bowl" follows a woman who receives a mysterious delivery of a bowl and experiences her boss dying. [5]
"Marzipan" looks through a young woman's eyes as her father acquires a large hole in his abdomen and her mother gives birth to her dead grandmother. [5]
"Quiet Please" follows a librarian who continuously has sex in her library with unsuspecting men on the day her father has died. [5]
"Skinless" follows a connection between a halfway house employee who is Jewish and a young boy who draws swastikas. [5]
"Fugue" follows three different people who are unhappy with their life in someway. [5]
"Drunken Mini" shows an imp and a mermaid's unique interaction. [5]
"Fell This Girl" follows a woman and her confusing sexual desires. [5]
"The Healer" told the story of two girls, one with a hand made of fire and one with a hand made of ice. [5]
"Loser" follows an orphan boy who has a talent of finding missing things, that develops as he grows older. [5]
"Legacy" follows a pregnant girl’s journey of falling in love with a hunchback [5]
"Dreaming in Polish" shows a town with a few different people; a daughter with an adventurer mother and a sick father, and an old husband and wife with prophetic dreams. [5]
"The Ring" follows the love story of a woman and a Robber who turn a mile of the ocean red. [5]
"The Girl in the Flammable Skirt" tells the story of a girl who has an unhealthy father and has a boyfriend in her closet. [5]
In 2002, four of the stories (“Call My Name", "Fugue", “Fell This Girl” and “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt”) were adapted to the theatre by Frederique Michel. [6] In 2011, the short story "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt" was the basis of a short film of the same name co-written by Aimee Bender and directed by Maggie Tran.
Alice Bradley Sheldon was an American science fiction and fantasy author better known as James Tiptree Jr., a pen name she used from 1967 until her death. It was not publicly known until 1977 that James Tiptree Jr. was a woman. From 1974 to 1985 she also occasionally used the pen name Raccoona Sheldon. Tiptree was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012.
Eudora Alice Welty was an American short story writer, novelist and photographer who wrote about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Her house in Jackson, Mississippi has been designated as a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public as a house museum.
The Blind Assassin is a novel by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. It was first published by McClelland and Stewart in 2000. The book is set in the fictional Ontario town of Port Ticonderoga and in Toronto. It is narrated from the present day, referring to previous events that span the twentieth century but mostly the 1930s and 1940s. It is a work of historical fiction with the major events of Canadian history forming an important backdrop, for example, the On-to-Ottawa Trek and a 1934 Communist rally at Maple Leaf Gardens. Greater verisimilitude is given by a series of newspaper articles commenting on events and on the novel's characters from a distance.
Margaret Rumer Godden was an English author of more than 60 fiction and non-fiction books. Nine of her works have been made into films, most notably Black Narcissus in 1947 and The River in 1951.
The Bloody Chamber is a collection of short fiction by English writer Angela Carter. It was first published in the United Kingdom in 1979 by Gollancz and won the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize. The stories are all based on fairytales or folk tales. However, Carter has stated:
My intention was not to do 'versions' or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, 'adult' fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories.
Aimee Bender is an American novelist and short story writer, known for her surreal stories and characters. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards.
Jennifer June Rowe,, is an Australian author. Her crime fiction for adults is published under her own name, while her children's fiction is published under the pseudonyms Emily Rodda and Mary-Anne Dickinson.
"The Cut-Glass Bowl" is a short story by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, first published in the May 1920 issue of Scribner's Magazine, and included later that year in his first short story collection Flappers and Philosophers. The story follows the lives of a married couple, Evylyn and Harold Piper, through various difficult or tragic events that involve a cut glass bowl they received as a wedding gift. In a copy of Flappers and Philosophers which he gave to literary critic H. L. Mencken, Fitzgerald wrote that he deemed the story to be "worth reading" in contrast to others in the volume which he dismissed as either "amusing" or "trash."
Pauline Melville FRSL is an English-Guyanese writer and former actress of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry, who is currently based in London, England. Among awards she has received for her writing – which encompasses short stories, novels and essays – are the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Guyana Prize for Literature. Salman Rushdie has said of Melville: "I believe her to be one of the few genuinely original writers to emerge in recent years."
The Great Automatic Grammatizator is a collection of thirteen short stories written by British author Roald Dahl. The stories were selected for teenagers from Dahl's adult works. All the stories included were published elsewhere originally; their sources are noted below. The stories, with the exception of the war story "Katina", possess a deadpan, ironic, bizarre, or even macabre sense of humor. They generally end with unexpected plot twists.
Patricia C. McKissack was a prolific African American children's writer. She was the author of over 100 books, including Dear America books A Picture of Freedom: The Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl;Color Me Dark: The Diary of Nellie Lee Love, The Great Migration North; and Look to the Hills: The Diary of Lozette Moreau, a French Slave Girl. She also wrote a novel for The Royal Diaries series: Nzingha: Warrior Queen of Matamba. Notable standalone works include Flossie & the Fox (1986), The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural (1992), and Sojourner Truth: Ain't I a Woman? (1992). What is Given from the Heart was published posthumously in 2019.
Chocolat is a 1988 French period drama film written and directed by Claire Denis that follows a young girl who lives with her family in French Cameroon. Marc and Aimée Dalens play the parents of protagonist France, who befriends Protée, a Cameroonian who is the family's household servant.
Florence Marryat was a British author and actress. The daughter of author Capt. Frederick Marryat, she was particularly known for her sensational novels and her involvement with several celebrated spiritual mediums of the late 19th century. Her works include Love’s Conflict (1865), Her Father's Name (1876), There is No Death (1891) and The Spirit World (1894), The Dead Man's Message (1894) and The Blood of the Vampire (1897). She was a prolific author, writing around 70 books, as well as newspaper and magazine articles, short stories and works for the stage.
The King's Daughter is a historical novel for young adult readers by Suzanne Martel, first published in 1974. It follows the life of Jeanne Chatel, one of the King's Daughters of New France in the seventeenth century.
Ann Hood is an American novelist and short story writer; she has also written nonfiction. The author of fourteen novels, four memoirs, a short story collection, a ten book series for middle readers and one young adult novel. Her essays and short stories have appeared in many journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Paris Review, Ploughshares,, and Tin House. Hood is a regular contributor to The New York Times' Op-Ed page, Home Economics column. Her most recent work is "Fly Girl: A Memoir," published with W.W. Norton and Company in 2022.
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories is a book of short stories published in 1991 by the Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros. The collection reflects Cisneros's experience of being surrounded by American influences while still being familially bound to her Mexican heritage as she grew up north of the Mexico-US border.
"Indian Camp" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. The story was first published in 1924 in Ford Madox Ford's literary magazine Transatlantic Review in Paris and republished by Boni & Liveright in Hemingway's first American volume of short stories In Our Time in 1925. Hemingway's semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams—a child in this story—makes his first appearance in "Indian Camp", told from his point of view.
"The Rememberer" is a short story by Aimee Bender, first published in fall 1997 issue of the Missouri Review. Later it was published in August 1998, in her anthology, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.
Dear Husband is a collection of 14 fictional short stories written by Joyce Carol Oates. It was published in 2009 by Ecco Press.
King Lindworm or Prince Lindworm is a Danish fairy tale published in the 19th century by Danish folklorist Svend Grundtvig. The tale is part of the more general cycle of the Animal as Bridegroom, and is classified in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index as tale type ATU 433B, a type that deals with maidens disenchanting serpentine husbands.