Women in Their Beds
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories |
|---|---|
| Author: | Gina Berriault |
| Honors: | |
| Genres: | |
| Publisher: | Counterpoint Press |
Nine new stories are included in this collection of thirty-five. All are such models of economy that they seem almost telepathic. Berriault employs her vital sensibility—sometimes subtly ironic and sometimes achingly raw—to touch on the inevitability of suffering and the nature of individuality, daring to see into the essence of our predicaments. What moves us? What dictates our behavior? What alters us? These stories illustrate Berriault’s depth of emotional understanding: the tragic loss of innocence in “The Stone Boy,” where nine-year-old Arnold accidentally kills his brother with a shotgun; the pointed wit in “God and the Article Writer” where a man is first demeaned and then elated by his submission to the people he interviews.
| Find it: | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| |||
Reviews
Amazon.com
Gina Berriault has been publishing short stories and novels for more than 30 years. For most of this time, she’s suffered the mixed blessing of being a “writer’s writer”—somebody with a fanatic following within the literary community and near invisibility outside of it. With Women in Their Beds, however, Berriault seems finally to be receiving the recognition she’s always deserved. The book—a greatest hits collection that includes nine new stories—has already won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Rea Foundation Prize. Lyrical, concise, and stubbornly resistant to secondhand wisdom, these stories are (in the words of Richard Ford) “nonpareil [and] just simply wonderful.”
