Time for Bed: Stories - Paperback

by Wendy Rawlings (Author), Michael Griffith (Editor)

Bed is where we sleep and dream, where we make love and give ourselves nightmares. The thirteen stories in Wendy Rawlings's Time for Bed traverse the complicated terrain of bedtime activity, from adulterous couplings to nightmares that come to life, in terms that can feel lurid, unsettling, or disturbingly funny. A college student struggles with her mother leaving her father for a "cafeteria lady" at her high school. A woman loses her only daughter in a mass school shooting and goes on a road trip to buy a custom coffin, then decides to take a side trip to NRA headquarters. A daughter decides she should be born again--literally. Social, cultural, and familial disruptions haunt these characters in their waking lives as they look to grab something or someone for stability.

Front Jacket

"Wendy Rawlings' Time for Bed is snappy, hilarious, bracing reading. She's a master storyteller who's thought long and hard about the possibilities of the form. This is a long-overdue collection from one of my favorite writers."--Jess Row

"Time for Bed took me to places I was scared to go and made me glad to be there. Whether Rawlings's stories involve the everyday or the outlandish, they come alive through the magic of deep and urgent emotion: stakes. Women are front and center here: mothers with regrets, daughters with desires, loyal friends, sworn frenemies. Time for Bed's final story is one of the best about 9/11 I've read." --Pamela Erens, author of Eleven Hours

Author Biography

Wendy Rawlings is the author of Come Back Irish, winner of the 2000 Sandstone Prize for Short Fiction, and The Agnostics, winner of the Michigan Literary Fiction Award. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Kenyon Review, the Cincinnati Review, Tin House, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She teaches creative writing at the University of Alabama.