Hello.
Can you guys hear me?
Mm-hmm.
All right, awesome.
When I think of Aimee Bender, I think of cake.
And when I think of cake, according to Aimee Bender,
I think of wonder.
In her fabulous stories, we encounter lemon cakes
that a girl realizes taste, particularly, sad.
Magical, replenishing, flavor and form-changing cakes
that an ogre's wife takes on her journey to independence.
Funeral cakes in freezers, eaten, later,
by the grandmother, for whom the funeral was held.
Cake is never just cake.
It is loneliness, longing, desire, love, loss, dread,
togetherness, yearning.
The stories, and the cakes within them,
remind us to be curious.
Magic simmers among the mundane if we look hard enough.
Aimee Bender's stories-- clever, sharp, funny, and poignant--
encourage us to surrender to the strange and the unknown
and the unexpected.
Fairy tales, we think we know, lead
us to thoroughly unfamiliar places.
High schools are populated with imps and mermaids and girls
with hands made of fire.
Aimee Bender wields imagination in a way
that reminds me of the way I encountered stories as a child.
Losing myself in a new world, with new rules,
emerging changed because of it.
In her short story, The Color Master, the narrator reflects.
"I would go on to do good things in my life,
have other meaningful moments, share
in the experience of being a human being in the world."
Aimee Bender's stories show us what
it means to be a human among other humans.
They remind us about the importance of kindness,
compassion, connection, even when
it's just a magical cake changing flavors
from vanilla pound to chocolate bundt,
deseeded, to satisfy whoever eats it.
Cake, after all, is never just cake.
Aimee Bender is the author of five books, including,
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake-- a novel,
which won the SCIB award for best fiction and an Alex
Award--
and The Color Master, a New York Times notable book for 2013.
Her books have been translated into 16 languages,
and her short fiction has appeared in Granta, GQ,
Harper's, Tin House, McSweeney's, The Paris Review,
and more.
She is a professor of creative writing
at the University of Southern California's PhD
in Creative Writing program.
Of her work, the Los Angeles Times writes--
"at a time when realism reigns supreme
over the literary landscape, one can argue,
it is absolutely imperative, that Aimee Bender be
spotlighted for what she is--
a vital MVP of modern letters.
Period.
In our world of flash-and-trash, Insta-internet-oddities,
and stranger-than-fiction social-media-bloopers,
she will have surpassed the simple feat of inventiveness
to own a most dazzlingly urgent relevancy."
Please join me in welcoming Aimee Bender.
[APPLAUSE]