The book i just finished, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, was written by Aimee Bender. Even without having an assignment to look up the author I probably would have because I love her name...and i love people with cool names. I know this sounds really suck-up-y but it's true, I'm seriously like google's number one user, I'm on it all the time.

Aimee Bender is a teacher of creative writing at USC as well as head to a class in surrealist writing at UCLA and has been help at a non profit theater workshop helping mentally ill and at-risk individuals write, direct and act in their own theater productions. She lives in Los Angeles where the book i read was based. In addition to many short fiction stories, she has written four books, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) which won the SCIBA award for best fiction this year. She has also two Pushcart prizes, and was nominated for the TipTree award in 2005, and the Shirley Jackson short story award in 2010. Her short stories have been published in many places in over sixteen languages as well as been heard on PRI. She has said people ho influence her writing are Oscar Wilde, Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Anne Sexton.

( I found most of this information from Aimee's Website www.flammableskirt.com)