Virtual Event – Aimee Bender

Magic City Books is thrilled to welcome Aimee Bender for a virtual author event in celebration of her new novel, The Butterfly Lampshade praised by the New York Times Book Review as “A surrealist memory box of a novel. . . Its particular quality of stillness hums with so much mystery and intensity that the book never feels static. It is a measure of the book’s success that as I reached the conclusion, I felt considerably more altered by the experience than I often am by novels that travel much further from their beginnings.” 

Aimee Bender will be in conversation with Kevin Smokler, author of Brat Pack America.

This event is free and hosted on the Zoom platform. To register in advance visit:

https://magiccitybooks.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_UltuilqpSQi82cgnfh8YNg

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event on Monday, September 7 at 7:00 CDT.

The Butterfly Lampshade is currently available at Magic City Books or you can purchase a copy here: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/the-butterfly-lampshade/194.

About The Butterfly Lampshade

The first novel in ten years from the author of the beloved New York Times bestseller The Particular Sadness Of Lemon Cake, is a luminous, poignant tale of a mother, a daughter, mental illness, and the fluctuating barrier between the mind and the world.

On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she’s sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see.

Twenty years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment, and two other incidents — her discovery of a desiccated beetle from a school paper, and a bouquet of dried roses from some curtains. Her recall is exact — she is sure these things happened. But despite her certainty, she wrestles with the hold these memories maintain over her, and what they say about her own place in the world.
As Francie conjures her past and reduces her engagement with the world to a bare minimum, she begins to question her relationship to reality. The scenes set in Francie’s past glow with the intensity of childhood perception, how physical objects can take on an otherworldly power. The question for Francie is, What do these events signify? And does this power survive childhood?

Told in the lush, lilting prose that led the San Francisco Chronicle to say Aimee Bender is “a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language,” The Butterfly Lampshade is a heartfelt and heartbreaking examination of the sometimes overwhelming power of the material world, and a broken love between mother and child.

AIMEE BENDER is the author of the novels The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake–a New York Times bestseller–and An Invisible Sign of My Own, and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Willful Creatures, and The Color Master. Her works have been widely anthologized and have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles