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Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction blackburn

Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction

Focused on the challenges faced by aspiring writers, Brady illuminates how technique serves 'story logic', the particular way fiction makes meaning. She offers a closer look at craft fundamentals (plot, characterization, point-of-view, imagery, style, and setting), including examples from classic and contemporary fiction and writing exercises.

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elizabeth blackburn


The Mechanics of Falling
and Other Stories


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, University of Nevada Press
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These stories, set largely in San Francisco, are about what happens when the seemingly fixed coordinates of our lives abruptly give way—when mother love fractures, the faithful husband abandons his family, a conscientious middle-class life implodes, loyalty demands excruciating sacrifices. The characters in these stories—a college student waitressing in a remote resort in the Sierras, a devout Christian man who works in a shelter for the homeless, a faded Berkeley radical, a privileged young woman who can’t figure out whom to blame for her inexplicable discontent—share a fundamental predicament, the struggle to name and embrace some faith that can break their fall. In equal measure, they hunger for and resist this elusive possibility and what it demands of them.

What one is willing to risk for the sake of transformation—or for the right to refuse it—is a particularly thorny dilemma for the women in these stories. In “Looking for a Female Tenet,” college student Mary Lee, bent on freeing herself from her working-class upbringing, betrays her allegiance to an embittered reading of the world’s offerings. “Slender Little Thing” relates the story of Cerise, who has worked all her life in menial jobs, and the story’s structure deconstructs the ways in which that does and does not define her, unpacking what is subsumed in a few sentences in the opening paragraph. In “The Dazzling World,” Judith, stuck in a relationship that has arrived at a stalemate, travels to an archaeological site in Guatemala to find that while she can’t shed her sense of loss, she is somehow buoyed by the small tokens of hope she discovers, reading in them a message as lucid as the geometry of a crystal.

The collection opens with “Looking for a Female Tenet,” in which the image of a narrow box haunts the action and traps Mary Lee, and ends with “Wicked Stepmother,” in which Lexie’s hope for transformation is embodied in the image of the ark, which couldn’t possibly have contained its cargo. These stories trace the effort to traverse the boundaries between one state and another—between conviction and self-doubt, recklessness and despair, resignation and rebellion—and each of them ends at a moment meant to propel the reader to imagine what’s next, to register the unfinished quality of every life.
elizabeth blackburn

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Powell

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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.

 


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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



Curled in the Bed of Love is an achingly lovely collection about the ache of love. Catherine Brady is a thrilling young fictional voice.

- Robert Olen Butler, author of Mr. Spaceman


elizabeth blackburn

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Calyx Books
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The End of the Class War

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.





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Catherine Brady writes about hardworking women who dutifully attend to the needs of aging parents, selfish husbands, and demanding jobs.  When these girls get ‘bold’ though . . . , and attend to their own needs, they rock, and their stories are full of humor, charm, and kindness.

- Molly Giles

Brady’s women are strong and vulnerable, stoic and passionate at the same time.  Their voices and lives touch us deeply.  Their tragedies and triumphs become our own.

- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni


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MIT Press


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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.



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Brady’s stories tell us about a prize-winning scientist, a professional woman, and a humble person driven by voracious curiosity.  She captures and unleashes into print the combination of creativity, passion, and pugnaciousness that makes Elizabeth Blackburn such an inspiration.

—Kathleen Collins, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley

"Catherine Brady's biography is a page turner from the first chapter,
weaving together the heroine's personality with her success as a scientist.

.. The book conveys a vivid impression of her that matches a personal
encounter."

–Maria Blasco, Nature