Aimee Bender has 8 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 20 narrators. The most-rated is WordTheatre: Lost & Found, Volume 1.
Thalia Book Club: Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Summary
The author of An Invisible Sign of My Own, whose work has been presented at Selected Shorts performances, discusses her second novel, a lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. She is interviewed by Heidi Julavits (novelist and co-editor of The Believer). A selection is performed by Lillo Way.
©2010 Symphony Space (P)2010 Symphony Space
WordTheatre: Heart Matters, Volume 1
Summary
WordTheatre, the short story performance specialists, casts the perfect actors to bring great contemporary writing to life. Recorded live with the authors present, these nine exquisitely crafted stories explore the emotional complications of this thing called love. From the intoxication of a first crush to the devastation of a broken heart, take a journey through the anguish and ecstasy of human emotions. Hallee Hirsh reading "The Ages" by Ramona Ausubel Mark Moses reading "The Meeting" by Aimee Bender Nicholas Brendon & Kirsten Vangsness reading "Billboard" by Richard Bausch Mary Stuart Masterson reading "A Preference for Native Tongue" by Don Lee Sharon Lawrence reading "Widow" by Michelle Latiolais Elisabeth Moss reading "Note to Sixth-Grade Self" by Julie Orringer Kathryn Erbe reading "Out of the Fray" by Mary Gordon Dinah Lenney reading "When Writing Is an Emergency" by Mary Otis Maggie Siff reading "Double-Blind" by Alethea Black Produced and directed by Cedering Fox; edited by Sara Bencivenga; mixed and mastered by Theo Mondle; music composed by Greg Chun. WordTheatre gives voice to great writing. We are an innovative, internationally recognized, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring empathy, curiosity, and conversation through powerful and entertaining performances, both live and recorded, of the world's best contemporary literature. We aim to ignite a passion for reading, writing, and self-expression in our community and in future generations.
©2014 Cedering Fox (P)2014 WordTheatre
The Color Master
Summary
The best-selling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake returns with a wondrous collection of dreamy, strange, and magical stories. Truly beloved by listeners and critics alike, Aimee Bender has become known as something of an enchantress whose lush prose is "moving, fanciful, and gorgeously strange" (People), "richly imagined and bittersweet" (Vanity Fair), and "full of provocative ideas" (The Boston Globe). In her deft hands, "relationships and mundane activities take on mythic qualities" (The Wall Street Journal). In this collection, Bender’s unique talents sparkle brilliantly in stories about people searching for connection through love, sex, and family - while navigating the often painful realities of their lives. A traumatic event unfolds when a girl with flowing hair of golden wheat appears in an apple orchard, where a group of people await her. A woman plays out a prostitution fantasy with her husband and finds she cannot go back to her old sex life. An ugly woman marries an ogre and struggles to decide if she should stay with him after he mistakenly eats their children. Two sisters travel deep into Malaysia, where one learns the art of mending tigers who have been ripped to shreds. In these deeply resonant stories - evocative, funny, beautiful, and sad - we see ourselves reflected as if in a funhouse mirror. Aimee Bender has once again proven herself to be among the most imaginative, exciting, and intelligent writers of our time.
©2013 Aimee Bender (P)2013 Random House Audio
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Summary
The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother - her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother - tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose. The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden - her mother's life outside the home, her father's detachment, her brother's clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the enormous difficulty of loving someone fully when you know too much about them. It is heartbreaking and funny, wise and sad, and confirms Aimee Bender's place as "a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language."(San Francisco Chronicle).
©2010 Aimee Bender (P)2010 Random House
The Butterfly Lampshade
Summary
The first novel in 10 years from the author of the beloved New York Times best seller The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, a luminous, poignant tale of a mother, a daughter, mental illness, and the fluctuating barrier between the mind and the world. On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight-year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see. Twenty years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment, and two other incidents - her discovery of a desiccated beetle from a school paper, and a bouquet of dried roses from some curtains. Her recall is exact - she is sure these things happened. But despite her certainty, she wrestles with the hold these memories maintain over her, and what they say about her own place in the world. As Francie conjures her past, and reduces her engagement with the world to a bare minimum, she begins to question her relationship to reality. The scenes set in Francie's past glow with the intensity of childhood perception, how physical objects can take on an otherworldly power. The question for Francie is: What do these events signify? And does this power survive childhood? Told in the lush, lilting prose that led the San Francisco Chronicle to say Aimee Bender is "a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language," The Butterfly Lampshade is a heartfelt and heartbreaking examination of the sometimes overwhelming power of the material world, and a broken love between mother and child.
©2020 Aimee Bender (P)2020 Random House Audio
Watchlist
Summary
Threats known and unknown. Etgar Keret. Robert Coover. Aimee Bender. Jim Shepard. Alissa Nutting. Charles Yu. Cory Doctorow. Randa Jarrar. Katherine Karlin. Miracle Jones. Mark Irwin. T. Coraghessan Boyle. Dale Peck. Bonnie Nadzam. Lucy Corin. Chika Unigwe. Footsteps in the night. Paul Di Filippo. Lincoln Michel. Dana Johnson. Mark Chiusano. Juan Pablo Villalobos. Chanelle Benz. Sean Bernard. Kelly Luce. Zhang Ran. Miles Klee. Carmen Maria Machado. David Abrams. Steven Hayward. Deji Bryce Olukotun. Alexis Landau. Bryan Hurt. We are being watched. That this statement no longer shocks is itself shocking. Post-Snowden, we know that the government - everywhere - has been reading our emails, listening to our phone calls, and watching whatever we do on the Internet. The only thing concealed is the nature of our watchers. In Watchlist, some of today's most prominent and promising fiction writers from around the globe respond to, reflect on, and mine for inspiration the surveillance culture in which we live. From drone strikes to birds mistaken for spies, paintings that change when they're not looked at to machines that let their dying users look back and reconsider the most important decisions of their lives, these stories take a broad and imaginative look at the state of surveillance in our global and interconnected world. How does constant surveillance affect us? Does it change how we behave as we seek approval or avoid judgment from an often faceless audience? Do we know who's watching? What does it mean to be watched? By turns political, apolitical, cautionary, and surreal, these stories reflect on what it's like to live in the surveillance state. Edited by Bryan Hurt.
©2015 Bryan Hurt (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
Selected Shorts: Behaving Badly
Summary
The award winning series of classic and contemporary fiction returns with a collection of darkly funny short stories by the likes of Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Aimee Bender, A.M. Homes, Nathan Englander, Kim, Addonizio, and George Saunders. Readers include Anjelica Huston, Neil Gaiman, Michael Imperioli, Harris Yulin, Christina Pickles, Jefferson Mays, and Christine Ebersole.
©2013 Symphony Space (P)2013 Symphony Space
WordTheatre: Lost & Found, Volume 1
Summary
WordTheatre, the short story performance specialists, casts the perfect actors to bring great contemporary writing to life. Recorded live with many of the writers present, these nine exquisitely crafted stories navigate fragile yet defining moments of transformation that inform us at every age. Perhaps a time or a place, a friend or relative, those memories that leaves an indelible mark, spark the imaginations of these wonderful authors. Vanessa Aspillaga reading "Lucho" by Patricia Engel Dean Chekvala reading "To Psychic Underworld" by Dan Chaon Cassidy Freeman reading "The Summer Before" by Alethea Black Mae Whitman reading "Swan Lake" by Meg Howrey Gary Cole reading "Walls" by Tod Goldberg Justin Chambers reading "Loser" by Aimee Bender Vincent Piazza reading "White Angel" by Michael Cunningham Eliza Pryor Nagel reading "The Russian Children Aren’t Happy" by Ellen Slezak Dana Delany reading "Sea World" by Janet Grillo Produced and directed by Cedering Fox; edited by Sara Bencivenga; mixed and mastered by Theo Mondle; music composed by Greg Chun. WordTheatre gives voice to great writing. We are an innovative, internationally recognized, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring empathy, curiosity, and conversation through powerful and entertaining performances, both live and recorded, of the world's best contemporary literature. We aim to ignite a passion for reading, writing and self-expression in our community and in future generations.
©2014 Cedering Fox (P)2014 WordTheatre