The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, By Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender's debut short-story collection shows a writer ready to flirt with the fantastical.

Largely concerned with the love lives of young metropolitans and desperate housewives, her cheerily bizarre scenarios give romance a fresh twist.

In the story "What You Left in the Ditch", an army wife is surprised to have her husband returned without lips – "I expected lips. Dead or alive, but with lips".

In other entries, unconventional young women pick up men on the subway and in the library. Bender is a writer with a very incendiary turn of phrase.