The Color Master by Aimee Bender

Full disclosure: I'm a diehard fan of Aimee Bender. I admire the way she defies categorization even while all of her fiction has a magical realism/fantasy element. Especially in a collection like this one, I admire the way she's able to assume a new, convincing authorial voice for each story. And I'm constantly amazed at the mysteries of her writing, which makes every story, no matter how long, seem too short.

I experienced The Color Master for the first time by reading each story aloud to my husband. He enjoyed the stories, but maintains that Ms. Bender doesn't know how to come to an end. Every time, he said some variation of, "That's it? That's where she chose to end it?" On a writerly level, I appreciate that she ends each story when she feels it's complete. These stories are evocative, meant to point to a bigger truth or to a whole world beyond what the reader's just read. Anyone who's expecting an entire world described and signed, sealed, delivered, should read a novel, and probably not a novel by Aimee Bender. It's just not what she's trying to do.

This is Bender's third collection of stories. In the first two collections, I thought there were some hits and misses (although even the misses were ecstatic and thrilling in their own way). Here, the quality is consistently high to the extent that going back through, I can't point out a weak one. Each one is memorable and impressive for any number of reasons, and together they make up a tour-de-force book even better than a die-hard fan like me could have hoped for.