Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr

Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 231 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Amy Bender.

She's the author of the novels An Invisible Sign of My Own and The Particular Sadness of

Lemon Cake, as well as the Short Story Collections, the girl in the flammable skirt and

willful creatures.

Her short fiction appears in Granta, GQ, Harpers, Tin House, McSweeny's, and to the Paris Review,

and she also teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California.

And we'll be speaking with her today about her new short story collection, The Color Master.

And now here's our interview with Amy Bender.

All right, so we're here with Amy Bender.

All right, so we're here with Amy Bender. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

Okay, so I've heard you say that as a kid you were really into fantasy books,

so tell us about that.

Yeah, I think those were by far my favorite books so the whole gamut the all the Madeline Leangel books she kind of

has a split canon of half magical sciencey and half realistic and I always

vastly prefer the magical sciencey ones and CS Lewis and the I guess S. Lewis and the Oz books actually loved pretty deeply.

I guess there was like this is a wonderful book by Julie Andrews famous singer

Julie Andrews called The Last Other Really Great Wang Doodles. That's a

fantastic book. I love that book. I also liked, like when I moved into kind of adolescence I was

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