Aimee Bender Archive
Fiction of the Shopping Mall
We already know that consumer goods are not the stuff of human happiness. And yet, stories by Carmen Maria Machado, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Aimee Bender underline this reality while also rendering it more complex, interrogating the ways in which we can and cannot resist capitalism and its cruelties.
Consciousness and the Creative Impulse
The language of literature has an existential condition. Poetic consciousness is a term that, generally, speaks to the ability that language has when employed with artistic intention, to alter perception, to heighten it.
The Virtues of Patience
By nature an impatient person, I have found that the two states I’ve always wanted most for my life—writerhood and motherhood—can demand more than I comfortably have in reserve.
We Have Something to Say
Inside most classrooms lives a beast, many-eyed. If you’ve been a student in a classroom, especially in those early grades when a year lasts an eon, you’ve been part of this beast. You saw your elementary-school teachers with a collective, sharpened vision (their combovers, fluffy perms, paunches, thick, magnifying