This Week's Reads

Willful Creatures
By Aimee Bender (Doubleday, $22.95)

In his A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace talks about writers being not merely observers but stalkers, creepy watchers, obsessive-compulsive students of human behavior. And OK, so maybe we are, but few are as good at sociological surveillance as Aimee Bender. Her brilliance isn't just in picking up on the tiny, whispered actions that stand for our big ideas and giant hang-ups, it's in artfully and stealthily turning them around and feeding them back to us as matter-of-fact human nature. When the characters in her new story collection act and think in small, seemingly insignificant ways, she's telling you something important about them—although exactly what isn't always obvious at first pass.

In "Off," an unnamed woman begins the story by saying, "At the party I make a goal and it is to kiss three men: one with black hair, one with red hair, the third blond." It seems like sarcasm, or an unfunny joke, except that the phrasing is so stiff and dry that you really have to wonder if she isn't serious. Four paragraphs later, you realize she is; this really is a story about an unnamed woman at a boring party who hits on a dark-haired guy, a redhead, and a blond. "Off" in particular is full of peculiarities and mundane observations. The protagonist scorns the other women at the party and their identical handbags, shoes, and sweaters. She disdains the fact that the works of Dutch masters are reproduced on the covers of address books and on ceramic mugs. She reveals that she's rich and has everything she needs, but later, she schemes to steal everyone's coats. Bender's sentences go from overly long to short staccato things that feel like nervous, anxious burps. You get that something ominous is unfolding, but you don't get exactly what it is. Eventually, you realize that the pleasure you're taking in uncovering it is as subversive as the woman and her Neapolitan-flavored conquests and stolen coats.

So it goes with the other 14 stories in Willful Creatures: They're full of perverted deviants, greedy lovers, fantastical beings, and dry, quotidian observations. Reading them in this fashion, jumbled together, you come upon your own simultaneously boring/kinky nature, too. In "End of the Line," a regular-sized man mistreats the miniature man he purchased at a pet store. Later, he lets him out of his cage and follows him on his miniature bus back to the miniature people colony and has to stifle the urge to step on the small bus and squash it like Godzilla. Yet this all feels disarmingly correct—as if in some state, Kansas maybe, there are colonies of small people, and some of them are occasionally kidnapped and sold in pet stores, and we normal-sized folks aren't always entirely kind to them.

In "Ironhead," a married couple with pumpkins for heads produces a child with an iron for a head. They love their weird little offspring, but he's unwell and cannot thrive. Eventually he dies, and their friends and neighbors bring casseroles. It isn't a surreal metaphor about illness or deformity, it's just Bender playing with fantasy and exploring magical realism. She recently told an interviewer that she likes to write in the early morning, "closest to dreams [as] I can get." This story, like all her stories, is about the gray chain links separating the subconscious from the office cubicle, and about the prosaic things that sit on that fence, lurking and unfolding. LAURA CASSIDY

Aimee Bender will appear at Elliott Bay Book Co., 7:30 p.m. Thurs., Aug. 25.

My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands
By Chelsea Handler (Bloomsbury, $13.95)

Most people can dredge up one or two painfully hilarious—or at least embarrassing—stories from their sex life, and retell them for the amusement of those who can't. It's a delicious, vicarious thrill for listeners: You can enjoy the bedroom antics of your craaazy friends, but thank God it didn't happen to you. In that simple way, Horizontal succeeds for the reader. But like author Chelsea Handler and her boundless libido, you're frequently left unsatisfied—despite all her and her book's potential.

On the Oxygen Network's Girls Behaving Badly, Handler and her fellow comediennes specialize in making strangers feel threatened or uncomfortable, using skits often orchestrated in a studio where all but an unlucky few are in on the joke. Handler's stories work in much the same way—setups. Consummation matters less than situation in a series of Handler's alcohol-fueled "almosts" with a leather fetishist, a Vegas stripper named Thunder, a coke-snorting government attorney, and others. The book also takes a few chapters to get to a bona fide one-night stand, and it opens with a 7-year-old Handler attempting to secretly photograph her sexually adventurous parents. It's not particularly funny, nor are the depictions of trashy men the teenaged Handler makes out with at the Jersey shore and on Martha's Vineyard. Each encounter is motivated by animal lust, but her descriptions of the men and the sex are disappointingly modest. When Handler hooks up with someone she actually likes, she writes, "The sex was okay, but for some reason I lost interest . . . or consciousness. Whichever." More likely, the encounter didn't generate any good material for her stand-up routine.