Curled in the Bed of Love

by Catherine Brady

Overview

To read Curled in the Bed of Love is to feel the incessant tug between devotion and desire that can unmake even the closest couple. These eleven stories are set in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in true Left Coast style, Catherine Brady's characters are as resolute in evading middle-class conformity as they are in clinging to their illusions about love. And while they never shy from paying their dues, they can't help but wonder sometimes if their choices have at last accrued too high a cost. What lies in the bed of love, with women and men curled sometimes in repose, sometimes in a defensive knot, are failed dreams, reproofs, ambitions, and stubborn beliefs.

Always, mortality threatens the lovers' embrace. In the title story, Jim and his HIV-positive partner contend with an illness that has fueled their love but also threatens to consume it. In some stories, an outsider exposes the frailty of a relationship. Claire, who's opted for a steady marriage in "The Loss of Green," is both stirred and repelled by the advances of her former mate Sam, a radical environmentalist with a predatory need to reassert his claim on her. And in "Behold the Handmaid of the Lord," Debbie, compelled to translate a brief affair with her cousin's fiancé into a profound transgression, comes clean on a sleazy national talk show.

All of Brady's stories are gritty and unflinching in their gaze, yet lyrical and rich in the imagery of stasis and change—an empty house too long on the market, a pair of kayakers riding out a patch of rough sea, a greenhouse in which the orchid blooms only suggest the darting vitality of butterflies and birds. There is much to learn in these tales of flawed but good people working hard to hold their lives together.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820342207
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	04/01/2012
Series:	Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction Series , #38
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	4.80(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

CATHERINE BRADY is the author of Curled in the Bed of Love, which won the 2011 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her story collection The End of the Class War was a Book Sense 76 selection, and The Mechanics of Falling received the Northern California Book Award for Fiction. Her nonfiction works include Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction and Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres. She has taught in the MFA in Writing program at the University of San Francisco. Her stories have appeared in such publications as The Cimarron Review, Other Voices, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Short Stories 2004.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
The Loss of Green
Comfort
Nothing to Hide
Honor Among Thieves
Curled in the Bed of Love
Light, Air, Water
Side by Side
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Roam the Wilderness
Written in Stone
Behold the Handmaid of the Lord

Editorial Reviews

How does she do it? Brady's range is dazzling. . . . Her stories, unflaggingly compassionate, delve into the complexities of identity and connection.

author of The Daiquiri Girls - Toni Graham

These compelling, intimate stories illumine the lives of people who are old enough to know themselves—their joys and weaknesses, their private passions—and who yet often surprise themselves when they discover what they cannot give up. A beautiful and poignant collection.

Lan Samantha Chang of Hunger: A Novella and Stories

Compelling and illuminating short stories that reveal private passions, the human tendency to cling to the familiar and the razor's edge on which so many relationships are balanced. Brady shows a broad range, while retaining a simple, yet strong and clear voice. She is a writer to watch.

San Jose Mercury News

It's rare for a writer to explore with such subtlety and respect the curious sumbiosis of the needy and the needed as Brady does.

New York Review of Books - Joyce Carol Oates

An achingly lovely collection about the ache of love. Catherine Brady is a thrilling young fictional voice.

Robert Olen Butler of Mr. Spaceman

Brady is a meticulous writer. Every word seems carefully chosen in order to trace the fine contours of her characters' subtle and complex desires. . . . The grace of Brady's writing is only enhanced by the dialogue between the characters. At times it is surprisingly snappy. Surprising, perhaps, because their internal lives are described with such care, their desires and inner struggles mapped so astutely

Women's Review of Books - Rebecca Tuch

An achingly lovely collection about the ache of love. Catherine Brady is a thrilling young fictional voice.

Author of Mr. Spaceman - Robert Olen Butler

These compelling, intimate stories illumine the lives of people who are old enough to know themselves—their joys and weaknesses, their private passions—and who yet often surprise themselves when they discover what they cannot give up. A beautiful and poignant collection.

Author of Hunger: A Novella and Stories - Lan Samantha Chang

"How does she do it? Brady's range is dazzling. . . . Her stories, unflaggingly compassionate, delve into the complexities of identity and connection."—Toni Graham, author of The Daiquiri Girls

"These compelling, intimate stories illumine the lives of people who are old enough to know themselves—their joys and weaknesses, their private passions—and who yet often surprise themselves when they discover what they cannot give up. A beautiful and poignant collection."—Lan Samantha Chang, author of Hunger: A Novella and Stories

"An achingly lovely collection about the ache of love. Catherine Brady is a thrilling young fictional voice."—Robert Olen Butler, author of Mr. Spaceman

"Brady's stories wrap all the old questions in new packaging: live, crisp prose and characters who genuinely seem to feel. The plots may be familiar, but the sensibility is refreshingly different."—Kirkus Reviews

"It's rare for a writer to explore with such subtlety and respect the curious symbiosis of the needy and the needed as Brady does."—Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books

"Compelling and illuminating short stories that reveal private passions, the human tendency to cling to the familiar and the razor's edge on which so many relationships are balanced. Brady shows a broad range, while retaining a simple, yet strong and clear voice. She is a writer to watch."—San Jose Mercury News

"Brady is a meticulous writer. Every word seems carefully chosen in order to trace the fine contours of her characters' subtle and complex desires. . . . The grace of Brady's writing is only enhanced by the dialogue between the characters. At times it is surprisingly snappy. Surprising, perhaps, because their internal lives are described with such care, their desires and inner struggles mapped so astutely."—Rebecca Tuch, Women's Review of Books

From the Publisher

Brady received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction for this second story collection, which gathers 11 well-written vignettes about assorted characters in the San Francisco Bay area, who all share a predilection for wine and sex. This was a staple of Hemingway's writing, too, but somehow the efforts here-Brady's allusions to poetry, art, jazz, literature, and addiction-come together as a collection of neatly packaged clich s. Still, even when they are skimming deeper relationship issues with cursory metaphors, the stories are highly readable. Brady has a powerful descriptive control and an ease with words that serve to complicate ordinary setups and deliver quietly devastating moments. She attempts to take on every sad aspect of relationships, from disease and death to infidelity and impotence, yet the strongest stories make the reader understand why we still go on looking for love. Recommended for larger libraries.-Prudence Peiffer, Southampton, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Eleven stories tackle the entanglements of young love and marriage, in a second collection by Flannery O'Connor Award-winning from Brady (The End of the Class War, 1999). Wandering his neighborhood in search of evidence about the accident that injured him, the Vicodin-anesthetized whiplash victim of "Side by Side" feels an attraction that animates all these tales: "The lit windows, tantalizing behind drawn curtains, beckon him, and on those rare occasions when he passes an uncurtained window, he slows to seize this glimpse through a peephole into another world." More often than not, this other world is tinged by the residues of lingering traumas, small and large. In "The Loss of Green," a woman's former lover reappears to test her fidelity to a new life and marriage that, so far, have only produced a miscarriage. A limo driver in "Comfort" considers the nature of luxury and suffering as a ride turns sour and he becomes an unlikely knight to the rescue. The Zoetrope award-winning "Curled in the Bed of Love" is a dull story about (sigh) love in the time of AIDS, while "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is an episodic ramble through a woman's two marriages and two children, posing as its ultimate issue the question of whether she will grant redemption to the husband who slipped into addiction. Another redemption is sought by the hairdresser in "Behold the Handmaid of the Lord," who takes the cousin she betrayed on a national talk show to ask for forgiveness-but is a true apology possible anymore? Bordering on the sentimental, but often experimental enough to avoid it, Brady's stories wrap all the old questions in new packaging: live, crisp prose and characters who genuinely seem tofeel. The plots may be familiar, but the sensibility is refreshingly different. A voice coming into its own.

Kirkus Reviews