Gina Berriault

Now with a new introduction by Peter Orner, a beautiful reissue of Gina Berriault's stunning collected stories, which received the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award, the 1997 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Rae Award for the Short Story.

Collected Stories

Women in Their Beds

A Novella

Conference of Victims

Lights of Earth

New and Selected Stories

The haunting story of a woman who desires “something more, as if something more had been promised her that was not yet given.” Vivian Carpentier, confined by her role as an upper class woman in the 1940s, gleans meaning only from erotic love. Troubled by the elusiveness of men, yet convinced that they run the world, she can barely conceal her desperation to entice. Struggling with motherhood and the failure of marriage, she takes jobs to bridge intervals between lovers. She sings in a hotel bar, sells dresses, and nurses her father’s friend through his last illness, hoping to atone for a self-centered life. The constant in Vivian’s life is her son, David. Having seen her worst and best moments, he provides her with consolation and a reason for living.

The Son

Stories

Seven Stories

Collects stories, essays, articles, and interviews by the late author of Women in Their Beds, in a treasury that includes her personal thoughts on the art of writing and her acceptance speech for the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal for Literature. Reprint.

The Uncollected Writings of Gina Berriault

The Tea Ceremony

Melcher Media

In these and seven other stories, The Beach Book gathers a seminal selection of fiction set on beaches around this big glue globe. Internationally acclaimed authors and emerging voices have all written eloquently about the sea's siren song. This book is completely waterproof. Put it right in your beach tote along with your sunscreen and beach ball!

The Beach Book

Collects stories, essays, articles, and interviews by the late author of Women in Their Beds, in a treasury that includes her personal thoughts on the art of writing and her acceptance speech for the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal for Literature. 25,000 first printing.

The Uncollected Writings

Berriault echa mano de su extraordinaria sensibilidad —a veces sutilmente irónica, a veces dolorosamente directa— para abordar la inevitabilidad del sufrimiento y la naturaleza de la individualidad, y se arriesga a asomarse a la verdadera esencia de nuestros dilemas vitales. ¿Qué nos motiva a actuar? ¿Cuál es la raíz de nuestro comportamiento? ¿Qué nos refrena o nos cambia? Su escritura es sobria y evanescente, como si imitara el pulso de la vida, pero cada tanto la empatía la vuelve inusitadamente luminosa. "La mitad de las mujeres del mundo están en este momento en la cama, en la suya o en la de otro, ya sea de noche o de día, tanto si lo desean como si no." En " Mujeres en la cama", la prosa de Berriault —honesta, conmovedora y sabia— alcanza su punto más alto y vuelve a reivindicar el relato como la más ejemplar de las formas literarias. Berriault fue una escritora enteramente moderna, bendecida con un exquisito sentido de la potencia de las palabras y con la habilidad de crear momentos de empatía que son a un tiempo perturbadores y misteriosamente gozosos. "Es preciso esforzarse mucho para encontrar, en estos relatos, una sola frase que no tenga la perfección de una gema." — The New York Times Book Review

Mujeres en la cama

“In these 35 stories, one struggles to find a sentence that is anything less than jewel–box perfect.” —The New York Times Book Review Gina Berriault is known for the complexity and compassion with which she weaves her characters, and her stories are such models of economy that they seem almost telepathic. In this reissue of her collected stories—twenty years after its first publication—with a new introduction by renowned author and devoted Berriault advocate Peter Orner—we see the deft hand of this well–loved master of the short story at its best. 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? Her writing is spare, evanescent, pulsing with life and shimmering with life's strange hope. Her stories illustrate the depth of her emotional understanding. “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...” With Women in Their Beds, Berriault's prose—moving, honest, and wise—achieves a mastery of the short story form that was in evidence every step of her long career. She was a completely modern writer, blessed with an exquisite sense of the potency of words and the ability to create moments of empathy that are both disturbing and mysteriously amusing.

Thirty-Five Stories

Women In Their Beds

The Descent

"Short stories and some short novels are close to poetry—with the fewest words they capture the essence of a situation, of a human being. It's like trying to pin down the eternal moment." —Gina Berriault Gina Berriault was one of the great, rare masters of short fiction. With commendable restraint and economy, she delivered stories that contain entire worlds inhabited by a range of characters thrown into all kinds of unsettling predicaments. As a short story writer she had a gift for tapping into the emotions of love, hope, and grief, and for making them palpable within her narratives. No two of her stories are alike, except for in the inevitable disquiet the reader feels in their wake, the exquisite unease that remains at the end of such acclaimed tales as "The Cove," "The Stone Boy," and many others. Now, in this compelling posthumous collection, Berriault's astonishing short fiction once again proves that her position as one of America's best storytellers remains unchallenged.

Gina Berriault

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