PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories
Women in Their Beds is a short-story collection that writes women’s solitude, secrets, and old wounds in a quiet, restrained style. Through small events and accumulating memory, it reveals both human fragility and strength.
Work Information
A quiet collection that gathers up women’s solitude and secrets.
In a hushed style, the stories depict women’s solitude, secrets, and past wounds. Through everyday detail and accumulated memory, they bring out the strength and fragility hidden inside each character.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Counterpoint
- Published
- 1996-03-01
- Pages
- 342 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.88 x 3.81 x 23.5 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781887178105
- ISBN-10
- 1887178104
- Price
- 12309 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Short Stories/Single Author
Half the women in the world are right now in bed, theirs or somebody else's, whether it's night or day, whether they want to be or not...." In the title story of Gina Berriault's latest collection, an unsure young actress watches as wrenching changes take place, row upon row, bed upon bed, in the women's ward of a hospital where she fills in as a social worker. Finding there both kindness and harsh fate, she also discovers a reflection of her own life. 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.
Reviews
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Arrived early. Book in very good condition as described.
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Gina Berriault brings wit, compassion, bittersweetness, and edgy insight to a broad spectrum of character studies. Any fan of short fiction ought to be reading her.