Скачать или смотреть Aimee Bender Napped in the Reading Preserve

What's a reading preserve, you ask? No, it's not a story cooked with sugar and then canned to protect against fermentation (though in fact that sounds like a detail you might find in one of Aimee Bender's stories).

Five years ago, in an interview, I asked Aimee where she takes friends who visit L.A. She told me about The Museum of Jurassic Technology. "They have this wonderful, very dark exhibit of trailer parks in America," she said, "little dioramas of trailer parks with chirping crickets. It's beautiful! They have letters to the observatory and bats that fly through walls."

And she raved, "It's great for writers, because it's half real and half not, and no one knows what's what."

Last winter, I finally saw the place, thanks to the hospitality of a good friend at Vroman's Bookstore. In the context of Bender's latest novel, THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE, it makes perfect sense. A character who can taste the feelings of the people who make her food? LEMON CAKE could generate an exhibit unto itself.