Six short-story collections for ultra-specific moods

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog, Chrissie Gruebel tagged six short-story collections for very specific moods, including:

Your Mood: Whimsical—but in a Björk way, not a Zooey Deschanel way

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, by Aimee Bender

In a single collection, you get a boyfriend de-evolving into a salamander, a woman giving birth to her own mother, a man without lips, and a mermaid (among others). It’s an eccentric parade of characters and situations that will make you want to climb into Bender’s brain and get your Entertainment Weekly subscription forwarded there. Still, no matter how fantastical their premises, each story has an emotional payoff that feels all too relatable. Sure, we haven’t all been in a relationship with someone who has lost his lips—but we’ve all felt love, disappointment, hope, and grief. Bender wraps all that up in weird. And it’s great.

Read about the other books on the list.

Writers Read: Aimee Bender (June 2010).

--Marshal Zeringue