Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction

Curled in the Bed of Love

Winner of the 2002 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, this story collection is concerned with the incessant tug between devotion and desire that can unmake even the closest couple.  In these eleven stories set in the San Francisco Bay Area, the 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.  Claire, who’s opted for a steady marriage in “The Loss of Green,” is both stirred and repelled by the advances of her former mate Sam, a radical environmentalist with a predatory need to reassert his claim on her. And in “Behold the Handmaid of the Lord,” Debbie, compelled to translate a brief affair with her cousin’s fiancé into a profound transgression, comes clean on a sleazy national talk show.

- Lan Samantha Chang, author of Hunger: A Novella and Stories

- Robert Olen Butler, author of Mr. Spaceman

This short story collection explores the lives of working-class Irish American women, charting the psychological and moral terrain of class in contemporary America and celebrating women who speak in voices that are tart, shrewd, and lyrically resourceful. 

The women in these stories negotiate an unstable, conflicted compromise between personal aspiration and the compelling ties of family.  In “Rat,” a wild young girl, growing up in a household dominated by her immigrant father, believes she can alleviate her gentle mother’s burdens by abandoning her ornery, ailing grandmother in a farm field, only to acquire compassion at the high price of forfeiting her fierce freedom.  In “Lives of the Saints,” a seven-year-old boy angrily rebels against the permanent limits his spina bifida imposes on him, while his mother allows the incarcerated teen she tutors to punch her and kick her, seeking the bruises that will teach her the meaning of pain and provoke her husband to face their son’s suffering.  In “Pilgrimage,” a thirty-nine-year-old single woman, unable to become pregnant through infertility treatment, finds herself looking for a miracle at Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not! Museum in Anaheim, California, which advertises a potent pair of African fertility statues.  Always, these stories hold out the possibility of an astonishing transcendence.

Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA

Co-winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine,  molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn made headlines in 2004 when she was dismissed from the President’s Council on Bioethics after objecting to the council’s call for a moratorium on stem cell research and protesting the suppression of relevant scientific evidence in its final report.  But it is Blackburn’s ground-breaking work on telomeric DNA that will have the more profound and long-lasting effect on science and society.  Blackburn was the first to sequence telomeres, or chromosome ends, which function to protect DNA from deteriorating, and with her graduate student Carol Greider she co-discovered the quirky enzyme, telomerase, that extends them. Blackburn’s early work on an obscure pond organism launched the field of telomere research, with significant implications for human health.  Pursuing the implications of Blackburn’s work, researchers have discovered that telomerase and telomeres play a role in the aging of cells and in the growth and metastasis of cancer. 

This biography describes the science accessibly and compellingly. It also details Blackburn’s struggle to break down barriers in an elite, male-dominated profession, her role as a mentor to other women scientists, and the collaborative nature of scientific work.  The book gives us a vivid portrait of an exceptional woman and a new understanding of the combination of curiosity, imaginative speculation, and aesthetic delight that powers scientific discovery.