Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories [Hardcover]

Gina Berriault (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1996

This remarkable collection received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and a gold medal from the Commonwealth Club of California.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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." --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Whether focusing on yuppies or drifters, social workers or Indian restaurateurs, heroin addicts or teenage baby-sitters, Berriault (The Lights of Earth) writes with great psychological acuity and a compassion that comes always from observation, never from sentimentality. These 35 short stories have been published in magazines ranging from the Paris Review to Harper's Bazaar; 10 of them are here issued in book form for the first time. In "Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?" the dapper Alberto Perera, "a librarian who did not look like one," fears that the young drifter who has befriended him, wishing to discuss the Spanish poetry he carries in his pockets, is out to kill him; but the drifter is only trying to understand how?both literally and philosophically?to live. A 79-year-old psychologist woos a young, pragmatic waitress in "The Infinite Passion of Expectation." When she meets his ex-wife and witnesses the selfishness spawned by a life spent in deferment, she flees. In the clever "The Search for J. Kruper," an extremely famous and narcissistic novelist, noted for writing grand, poorly disguised autobiographical confessions, learns of the possible whereabouts of one of the few remaining living novelists as famous as he, a recluse who betrays nothing of himself in his writings. Each story is constructed so gracefully that it's easy to overlook how carefully crafted Berriault's writing is. Her lilting, musical prose adds a sophisticated sheen to the truths she mines.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 342 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; First Edition edition (March 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1887178104
• ISBN-13: 978-1887178105
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,526,793 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Truth about "Women" and its Awards, January 31, 2001

By 

Gary Amdahl (Redlands, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories (Paperback)

A customer offering a review below suggests that only "a P.R. ploy" could account for the acclaim surrounding "Women in Their Beds." I reviewed the book for The Nation, and was so overwhelmed by its beauty that I reviewed it a second time, in Hungry Mind Review. I can tell interested readers that, far from having benefited from a P.R. plot, this collection received virtually no publicity whatsoever. It was published by a small press in DC, Counterpoint, and its author, Gina Berriault, was remembered only by San Francisco literati of the early 60s--she'd published several books, then disappeared. When Counterpoint published the present volume, it went unreviewed for months. When it was presented as a candidate to the National Book Critics Circle panel of judges, many of them had heard neither of the book nor of Berriault. By the time they'd all read it, however, word was spreading and reviews were appearing. The NBCC judges were uniformly blown away (read the minutes of the meeting: blown away). Readers who can only be "cheered up" by stories of good things happening to good people, or who read to escape reality will find the stories in "Women" not to their taste. But readers who like fiction that deepens their perception of reality, who are "cheered up" by integrity and honesty and beauty and truth in the face of the mysteries and heartache of the world--they will read this book with great joy. That it succeeded without publicity in a world utterly dependent on publicity (if not altogether created by it) makes the book even sweeter.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How to read, August 2, 2001

By 

William Emery (kansas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories (Paperback)

How do I want to begin this? It seems the majority of the complaints leveled against this wonderful collection of short stories centers around the 'lack of plot'. Now, while not wishing to do a disservice to plot, which has its place and uses and wonderments, I do not think it is the reason to read a book. (Usually I am more eloquent than this, but there is this ghoulish little boy screaming in my ear and the taste of death has been in my mouth for the past 4 days, so I am a bit out-of-sorts, so please forgive me) Everyone says that the book is beautifully written... THEN THAT IS THE REASON FOR READING IT!! Great writing is what makes literature, and it contains plot, character, emotions, joy, everything a reader needs within itself. If you can't see all of these in this book, then you haven't quite learned how to read, and aren't completely aware of the power of language. This collection is astonishing in its depth and breadth of writing, and Berriault's breathtaking prose drives each story, giving it wings to soar above other books which focus on plot, or offer the reader some trite 'meaning of life' or answer to one of life's questions. Berriault is a writer who is above such absolutes and doesn't subscribe the the 'how-to' theory of fiction. I will promote this collection until the day I die, and hopefully afterwards as well.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bring on the Berriault!, December 4, 1999

By 

"mgerald" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories (Paperback)

There are some extremely fine stories in this collection, many of them happily exhumed from the lovely vault where they have been slumbering since going out of print."The Stone Boy", for example, buys us a ticket into the mind and heart of a boy who has killed his own brother; readers cannot soon forget the sizzling words used to convey his feelings. "The Diary of K.W." places the indigent heart of a desperate woman squarely beneath the lens of the Berriault microscope; there is a brilliance to this examination which few writers attain. And "The Infinite Passion of Expectation" takes flight in a mere few pages, a dumbfounding literary portrayal of what it can mean to hold out for love. All styles are uneven, however, and this collection is not spared that fact. "Felis Catus", though charming, is little more than a cozy cat story purring in front of the fire. "The Search for J. Kruper", though swiftly-moving and engaging, would seem to be an ultimately pointless tale told with words of wonder. Berriault's dialog jewels seldom glitter, and her narrative style can be daunting as a coast-to-coast trek. If she were a planet, her atmosphere would be in places quite dense--but glittering worlds lie below, just under the cloud cover of occasional verbal heaviness. May the success of this collection encourage its author to send us even more that stuns; in the line-up of San Francisco phenomena, she's as breathtaking as the Golden Gate Bridge.