Reviews
"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
Description
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…
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Catherine Brady is the author of three story collections, including the recently released The Mechanics of Falling. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2004 and numerous journals and anthologies. She is also the author of a biography of a Nobel laureate, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA, and has a forthcoming book on the craft of fiction.
