The Butterfly Lampshade

Praise

“Aimee Bender’s Latest Is a Proustian Reverie.  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. . . The novel [is] a kind of small-scale, supernatural Proustian reverie: Proust if what Proust had been trying to recover was not luminous, ordinary reality, but a rupture in luminous ordinary reality.. . . One finishes the novel with the eerie sense that we too are objects who have slipped accidentally into being and that, like the butterfly, the beetle and the dried rose, we really ought not to be here.”
–Kevin Brockmeier, The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice)
 
“[a] dazzling rumination on time and mental illness. . . Bender has a gift for rooting wonderfully inventive fables in a very recognizable, walkable world [and the] middle-class Los Angeles of backyards and hatchbacks, bus stops and craft shops, is overlaid with mythic events—modest miracles, observed by few, that expose a world of mystery. . . [Francie’s] receptiveness to the marvels eddying around brightens every detail in a small, deeply felt life.
–Anne Stringfield, Oprah Magazine

[A] poignant novel of love and mental illness.
–Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today
 
“A poignant, emotional story sprinkled with magic”
– Woman’s World
 
“[An] astounding meditation on time, space, mental illness, and family. . . Rich in language and the magic of human consciousness, Bender’s masterpiece is one to savor.”
–Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

“Woven through with unexpected images and unexplained phenomena, Bender’s novel is a moving meditation on choosing a positive future while acknowledging the circumstances of one’s past.”
–BookReporter