Curled in the Bed of Love: Stories

by Catherine Brady

Eleven stories set in San Francisco chronicle the lives of characters who avoid middle class lifestyles while clinging to their idealism about love and life, including Jim and his AIDS-afflicted partner who find romance and danger in the shadow of the disease, and a young woman who confesses an affair with her cousin's fiancée on a talk show. Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. (Story Collection)

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

232 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2003

Reviews

[Elizabeth]

When I was young, I found the short story melancholy. Just the sheer volume of literary life packed into so few pages reminded me of the brevity of actual life. (This early awareness may have come from being the mid-life crisis of my father, who was 45 when I was born.) My favorite short stories have often been those which use wit to capture the funny side of the swift passage of our mortal years. Grace Paley's "Wants" is a brilliant example. I also remember in my youth reading Jill McCorkle stories aloud to my mother and sharing a laugh. All of this is only of peripheral relevance to Kate Brady's wonderful collection, Curled in the Bed of Love. What struck me about these stories is that each one carried the resonance and depth of a novel. They managed to do more than merely suggest histories for their myriad characters, but to make those histories vivid and relevant to the story being told. I had the deep pleasurable feeling I get when I am submersed in a novel. And yet, having a 3.5 month old baby, I had the advantage that each "novel" took only a fraction of the time to read compared to a full-length novel. Remember when they used to imagine that meals would be replaced with pills? What would be the point of that, wondered those of us who enjoy our food. Well, these are little gems that pack all the flavor and pleasure of a novel. Highly recommended.

[Donna Jo Atwood]

Collection of short stories about love in many guises. I'd forgotten how much I dislike reading short stories for the most part.