The author of the critically acclaimed story collection "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt" returns with more sublime, beguiling, and breathtakingly original stories of love, sex, heartbreak, and potato babies.

The author of the critically acclaimed story collection "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt" returns with more sublime, beguiling, and breathtakingly original stories of love, sex, heartbreak, and potato babies.

"Contemporary fairy tales, cushioned by goofy humor and a deep tenderness for her characters, that aren't always as dark or as sinister as they initially appear." --The New York Times Book Review

Aimee Bender's Willful Creatures conjures a fantastical world in which authentic love blooms. This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman's children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotion, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition.