“The Color Master” by Aimee Bender

A golden-haired girl in the apple orchard, a woman married to an ogre, and tiger-mending sisters traversing Malaysia—a collection of 15 stories that dazzle, confuse, and hold a mirror up to reality. Check out our Winter 2014 pick for the LARB Book Club: “The Color Master” by Aimee Bender.

January 2, 2014

The Color Master was the winter 2014 LARB Book Club pick. To join the Book Club, where we put you in conversation with editors and members and send a copy of the selected title to your door, become a LARB Friend member today.

¤

“Tales that dazzle, confound, electrify, disturb, incriminate, and empathize. . . . [The Color Master] is absurd. It is remarkable. It induces mental whiplash.” —The Chicago Tribune

A traumatic event unfolds when a girl with hair the color of golden wheat appears in an apple orchard; a woman plays out a 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; and two sisters travel deep into Malaysia, where one learns the art of mending tigers who have been ripped to shreds.

In each of The Color Master’s fifteen remarkable stories, Aimee Bender holds a funhouse mirror up to reality, proving, once again, that she is one of the most intelligent and imaginative writers of our time.

¤

Aimee Bender is the author of the novels The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake — a New York Times bestseller — and An Invisible Sign of My Own, and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures. Her works have been widely anthologized and have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

¤
To view all Book Club picks, please visit the LARB Book Club page.