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    The Color Master: Stories
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    The Color Master: Stories
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    The Color Master: Stories
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Color Master: Stories

    Written by Aimee Bender

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake returns with a wondrous collection of dreamy, strange, and magical stories.

    Truly beloved by readers and critics alike, Aimee Bender has become known as something of an enchantress whose lush prose is "moving, fanciful, and gorgeously strange" (People), "richly imagined and bittersweet" (Vanity Fair), and "full of provocative ideas" (The Boston Globe). In her deft hands, "relationships and mundane activities take on mythic qualities" (The Wall Street Journal).

    In this collection, Bender's unique talents sparkle brilliantly in stories about people searching for connection through love, sex, and family-while navigating the often painful realities of their lives. A traumatic event unfolds when a girl with flowing hair of golden wheat appears in an apple orchard, where a group of people await her. A woman plays out a prostitution 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. Two sisters travel deep into Malaysia, where one learns the art of mending tigers who have been ripped to shreds.

    In these deeply resonant stories-evocative, funny, beautiful, and sad-we see ourselves reflected as if in a funhouse mirror. Aimee Bender has once again proven herself to be among the most imaginative, exciting, and intelligent writers of our time.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 13, 2013
    ISBN9780804148450
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for The Color Master

    4/5

    75 ratings11 reviews

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    • 5/5
      ** spoiler alert ** The Color Master by Aimee Bender is a compilation of short stories that blends together shades of the fairy-tale world and modern time. In her stories, Bender creates characters and worlds that are of the imagination and different from what we are used to; in doing so, the author allows us to examine the human condition without realizing we are actually examining ourselves. In her short stories, Bender’s characters endure things like a failing marriage, guilt, faith and materialism; which are things most readers can relate to. In this post-modern book, tangible objects help the characters establish an identity in the world. There is a strong reoccurring theme of materialism and it’s obvious that in Bender’s universe, her characters interact and love by investing in one another instead of talking and loving like humans do. The Color Master is titled after the 17th century fairy-tale “Donkeyskin.” The short story dedicated to this title is a sort of prequel to the story . Bender connects the surreal and modern time by incorporating kings, princesses, and dresses that are the color of the moon. In the story, a young girl learns how to create colors from her mentor, the “Color Master,” who is dying. Throughout the story, the young Color Master has to answer several demands from the widowed king, who is trying to marry his daughter. In answering his wishes, she must make a dress the color of the moon, the sun, and the sky. As her mentor teachers her about color and the shades to put throughout the dress, she never fails to remind her, “to put anger in the dress.” This is an example of giving a character something tangible in order to find her identity. The Color Master tells her protegee that if she puts anger in the dress, upon receiving it, the princess will find the courage to run away.The short story, “The Red Ribbon” is about a failing marriage and the wife’s obsession with having her husband pay her for sex. The unemployed wife feels that she can only be happy with him if she is financially supporting herself, and she finds a loophole by doing so, yet with her husband’s money. Once he stops paying her, she doesn’t want to have sex at all, and claims that if he stops, “She fears she will melt into nothingness.” Bender shows another great example of the human condition and how materialistic humans are. In the story, the wife is constantly writing down and keeping track of their sex life and the amount of money correlated. All she can think about is ways to spend her money and ultimately, make more money. Near the end of the short story, the wife has an epiphany and realizes that, “she has lost her generosity.” Yet she is clueless on how to get it back. In the beginning of the story, the wife was bored with the husband and felt that this way her only way of preventing herself from leaving; yet by the end of the story, it is revealed that the husband thinks about leaving, and the reader is left to assume that inevitably, he will leave her. Again, Bender creates characters that convey their love and feelings through acts that are not usually performed.In “The Devourings,” another short story inside the “The Color Master,” the author weaves a story that incorporates ogres and taverns, along with magical cakes and cloaks. Depicting another failed marriage, an ugly woman marries an ogre because he makes her feel beautiful. They live together happily with six ogre children, until one night the father accidently eats all of his children. The wife deals with the consequences of marrying an ogre and is left wondering, “how can a marriage recover?” She allows her husband to pack her bag with a replenishing cake and an invisible cloak and leaves to find a “river,” when in reality, she is leaving because she can’t cope to be around him. Eventually the woman is drawn back to her husband when she sees him throw up her relatives (a thing unheard of by ogres) during war, and is an example of how Bender’s characters communicate in different ways than humans in reality do. I highly recommend this compilation of short stories to anyone who enjoys a good twist on fairy tales. Benders style is beautiful and paints a picture of the rawness of humanity.
    • 3/5
      Some stories were beautiful, some forgettable. I laughed out loud a few times, and there was a sufficient number of twisted scenarios that I've come to love about Aimee Bender. While I mostly enjoyed reading this collection when I was able to get to it, it didn't quite have the quality of insisting that I keep at it...I think mainly because there was less magical realism than her other short story collections. Still a fan though, and still looking forward to more of her work.
    • 4/5
      Mythic, but anti-epic, these fascinating stories arise in the hinterlands of our lives or of the fantasy literature with which we are familiar. A somnolent syrup flows in their veins, but they have sharp teeth.
    • 4/5
      The Color Master: Stories is a newly released collection of short stories by Aimee Bender. Presented in three parts the 15 stories are all infused with a sadness (Bender also wrote The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake), as well as a dream-like quality in which the ordinary can take painful or unconventional turns.

      More and more I find myself becoming a fan of the short story. There are stories in this collection that certainly would help that evolution along, but there are also several stories that were disturbing. My favorites were Tiger Mending, Faces, The Fake Nazi, Lemonade, Bad Return, Wordkeepers, The Color Master, and Americca.

      The stories in the collection are:

      Part One
      "Appleless" was disturbing as a group of people who are only eating apples become entranced/obsessed by a woman who doesn't.
      "The Red Ribbon" chronicles a wife who decides to make her husband pay for intimacy.
      "Tiger Mending" follows two sisters into Malaysia where one is to mend tigers whose skin is shredding.
      "Faces" is from the point of view of a boy whose concerned mother is trying to understand why he doesn't remember his friends' names or faces.
      In "On a Saturday Afternoon" a young woman invites two male friends to her apartment and then plays a game that requires them to get intimate with each other while she watches.

      Part Two
      In "The Fake Nazi" an elderly man keeps turning himself into authorities for war crimes he couldn't have committed.
      "Lemonade" follows a teenage girl at a mall - trying to fit in.
      "Bad Return" delves into the friendships of women.
      In "Origin Lessons" a professor explains the vastness of the universe.
      "The Doctor and the Rabbi" tackles belief and how one lives their life.

      Part Three
      In "Wordkeepers" people are completely forgetting the names of common things, perhaps due to technology.
      "The Color Master" is based on a 17th century fairy tale where dress makers must make shoes/clothes to resemble
      In "State of Variance" a woman who only sleeps an hour a night tells her son that he has a face that is too perfect, too symmetrical.
      In "Americca" a family is disturbed to find useful but odd items mysteriously appearing in their home.
      "The Devourings” is another story based on an earlier fairy tale. A human woman marries a male ogre, who accidentally eats their childre

      Highly Recommended - if you enjoy magic realism and can handle some provocative content.

      Disclosure: I received an advanced reading copy of this book from Doubleday for review purposes.
    • 5/5
      Stephanie who works at my neighborhood book shop knows my reading tastes so well, that she often either predicts my wish list choices, or remembers books on the list better than I do. If I had the money to just give her a budget, I would have her pick the best-for-me new releases sight unseen.In the case of The Color Master: Stories by Aimee Bender, she handed me the copy bought for display as it came out of the box. I had completely loved Girl in the Flammable Skirt and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake but I hadn't mentioned either to her.The Color Master is a collection of short stories that are somewhere in between magical realism and slice of life. Some are just one step removed from contemporary life. Others are in the realm of fantasy or even the surreal. These are stories that need to be experienced, one or two a night over the course of about a month. Read, think, digest. Repeat.
    • 4/5
      Aimee Bender is certainly a distinctive and unique writer; I think any reader who knows her work could pick one of her stories out of a crowd after reading the first couple of paragraphs. Much of this uniqueness is in the surreal elements that often feature in her stories, but it's also in her soft, rich, and lyrical narrative voice. Even when rather horrific things happen in her stories (which isn't often) her voice is soft and understated.But it's probably the magical and surreal aspects of her stories that are most distinctive. In "Wordkeeper," people all over the world find themselves losing words -- they're unable to remember the names of everyday things. In "Tiger Mending," a skilled seamstress is recruited to help with stitching together wild tigers who keep splitting open for unknown reasons. In "Americca," a family finds that small items -- a tube of toothpaste, cans of soup, and so on -- keep mysteriously appearing in their home. Some stories don't have any element of magic, but these too are inventive in their bizarre situations and eccentric characters.When stories take place in a strange or unreal world, it can be difficult for readers to connect with the characters. Adding to this is the cool and distant fairytale-like style that many of these stories are written in. In a few stories, the central characters aren't even named, but are referred to as "the rabbi," "the secretary," and so on. It's a mark of Bender's artistry as a writer that in spite of these seeming obstacles, her characters come through as real, living people that we connect with and care about.Having said these positive things, I do have reservations about some of the stories in this collection.About half of the stories here feel rather unstructured; they seem to wander from one idea to another. In "A State of Variance" for example, a woman finds herself unable to sleep for more than an hour a night. Because of this she often has quick little hallucinations, but she does her best to hide this. Meanwhile, her son is reaching adulthood, and he finds that no one trusts him because his face is too perfect, too symmetrical. He tries to get into a fight, hoping that a solid punch will make his face less symmetrical. What do these elements have to do with one another? Why are they in the same story? What connects the beginning of the story to the end?The stories of this sort feel like baskets into which Bender has tossed a collection of charming but unrelated ideas, and maybe that's how they should be accepted and enjoyed. Alternatively, maybe I'm missing something -- some thread of connection that's too subtle for my eye. Whatever the case, I found these meandering stories less enjoyable than the ones with tightly structured plots where all the ideas were more clearly tied together.But in all of these stories there is that unmistakable Aimee Bender voice, and that voice is always a pleasure.
    • 4/5
      If nothing else, this collection of short stories by the author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is very creative and quirky to the point of being downright bizarre. Some were disturbing but likeable, and I enjoyed the author's imagination. One I just didn't get, probably the fault of the reader rather than the author. And then I came to Tiger Mending. I absolutely hated that story. Sure, I can see how maybe it was intended as allegorical, and it was well written, but it hurt me to read it. So, at that point, the book was earning a solid 3 stars from me.Then I read The Color Master and A State of Variance. These two stories are absolutely brilliant, and I loved them both. Again, very creative but also magical and touching, very special.So, for a mixed bag of stories that I loved and hated, this one ended up getting four stars from me.I was given an advance copy of the book for review.
    • 3/5
      Liked it but not as much as I expected to given how much I've loved all previous works. It could just be my lack of attention span right now but I seemed to forget the story as soon as I had finished it. Previous works left me thinking for days afterwards.
    • 4/5
      Bender is a very interesting writer with a wonderful imagination. Surprisingly, because I tend to associate her with magical realism, not all these stories had magical realism ion them. Of course many of them did. My favorites were the title story, The Colormaster and The wordkeepers, but the story I liked best was the one with the tigers, and I have no idea why. There was really only one story in this collection that I did not like and I won't tell you which one that was.A good collection of stories, a bit of magic to perk up ones day.
    • 5/5
      Aimee Bender writes stories of magical realism that have an edge of darkness to them- and sometimes more than an edge. While some are quite lovely- her writing has a bit of a bejeweled quality- they all have something ‘off’ even when there is no actual magic involved. The people don’t seem to make connections with each other, and they are all seeking that connection. A number of the stories feel like fairy tales; not the ones with pretty fairies and happy endings, but more of a brothers Grimm feel- a bit disturbing and unsettling. But the unsettled feeling is part- along with the language- that makes this book so good. This isn’t a book to read in a rush; each story deserves to be read by itself, with time to savor it before moving on. I’m not usually impressed by an entire book of short stories, but I am with this one. Even in a book of good stories, though, one stands out, the title story “The Color Master”. In this tale, a store produces clothing and shoes for the upper class. They don’t just use regular dyes and pigments; they use multiple dyings of different colors and pigments rubbed on over the top of these. Some of the pigments and dyes are crushed opals and diamond powder. The real treasure of the story is the Color Master herself, though, the person who can create such marvels as a dress the color of the sun, or the color of the moon. I highly recommend this book and need to find some of her other works.
    • 4/5
      Magic realism is a tricky thing. Go too far in one direction and the result can be either fantasy or an inability to keep that disbelief suspended. Go too far the other way and the result can be so close to the real world that the reaction is: Why bother?Aimee Bender, like two characters in the title story of this collection, knows how to mix the ingredients together just right.Her stories are filled with yearning. Some characters do outrageous things, daring themselves to push past acceptable behavior. Even the thought of doing outrageous things, dangerous things, changes the world or the characters, and there is a sense of loss.Other characters dare themselves to discover, and the result often is a finding of themselves, or love, or both. Often, the stories have healing qualities. Characters are saved or come to new realizations about themselves that make their lives better. They learn to create colors so garments reflect the sun, the moon and the sky. They learn how to mend tigers and why the tigers need mending. A cake that was created to replenish itself learns how to overcome the darkness of the never-ending need to please. A man with a perfect face learns how to find the love of his life. A family that receives unexpected presents learns to cherish what they have.Some of the stories defy easy explanation. And that’s all right. The moods, the emotions, the journeys that the characters undertake are worth savoring and being allowed to steep into memory. They should not be rushed through. They should be enjoyed.