Willful Creatures Stories Written by Aimee Bender | Doubleday | Hardcover | August 2005 | $22.95 | 978-0-385-50113-2 (0-385-50113-7) About this Book Aimee Bender’s Willful Creatures conjures a fantastical world in which authentic love blooms. This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman’s children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotion, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition. Quotes "[Bender] is Hemingway on an acid trip; her choices are twisted, both ethereal and surprisingly weighty. . . . Terrifyingly lovely." –Los Angeles Times “New, exciting, harsh, rugged and unyielding. . . . Every sentence in [Willful Creatures] is a fresh surprise.” –The Washington Post "Contemporary fairy tales, cushioned by goofy humor and a deep tenderness for her characters, that aren't always as dark or as sinister as they initially appear." –The New York Times Book Review “These are stories that you'll read with a sense of discovery and wonder. You'll re-read them just for their beauty.” –The Denver Post "To curl up with an Aimee Bender story is to thank heaven you ever learned to read in the first place. . . . What a treat to spend 15 stories in Bender's vast and wonderfully unhinged imagination.” –Entertainment Weekly “I am a long-standing, passionate fan of Aimee Bender’s stories. Her images explode, her words ignite. Watching her imagination catch fire remains a sustaining joy in my readerly life.” —Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones About the Author Aimee Bender is the author of the short story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own. Her stories have appeared in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, the Paris Review, and other magazines, and have been heard on PRI’s This American Life. She lives in Los Angeles.