About Catherine Brady
Catherine Brady’s second short story collection, Curled in the Bed of Love, was the co-winner of the 2002 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and a finalist for the 2003 Binghamton John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Brady’s first collection of short stories, The End of the Class War, was a finalist for the 2000 Western States Book Award in Fiction. Her short story “Written in Stone” was selected by Lorrie Moore for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2004. Other stories have appeared in numerous journals, including Missouri Review, Ontario Review, Cimarron Review, Kenyon Review, and Redbook, and in anthologies, including Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Loving a Child with Special Needs (forthcoming), I Know Some Things: Stories about Childhood by Contemporary Writers, and The Next Parish Over: A Collection of Irish American Writing. A past winner of the Redbook Young Writers Award, Brady is the recipient of the 2001 Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Prize and the Brenda Ueland Prose Prize.
Brady is also the author of a biography of a molecular biologist, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA. Her critical essays on the craft of fiction have appeared in the Writer’s Chronicle.
Brady received an MA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Hollins College and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts. She was elected to the board of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in 2005 and served as Vice-President (2006) and President (2007). She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.
About The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories
This book presents eleven new stories that are set in and around San Francisco by an award-winning author. The stories in this collection explore those moments when the seemingly fixed coordinates of our lives abruptly give way – when mother love fractures, a faithful husband abandons his family, a conscientious middle-class life implodes, or loyalty demands an excruciating sacrifice. The characters 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. “The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories” deals with a range of circumstances and relationships, and with characters who must decide what they are willing to risk for the sake of transformation, or for the right to refuse it. The 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 story propels the reader to imagine what will happen next, to register the unfinished and always precarious quality of every life.
Catherine Brady’s TLC BOOK TOUR Stops:
Wednesday, April 1st: Diary of an Eccentric
Thursday, April 2nd: Musings of a Bookish Kitty
Friday, April 3rd: S. Krishna’s Books
Monday, April 6th: Caribousmom
Tuesday, April 7th: Maw Books Blog
Wednesday, April 8th: A Simple Walk
Friday, April 10th: Eleanor’s Trousers
Monday, April 13th: …and hijinks ensued.
Thursday, April 16th: Tomorrow is Another Day
Friday, April 17th: A Blog of Her Own
Tuesday, April 21st: Book Club Classics!
Wednesday, April 22nd: Books on the Brain
Thursday, April 23rd: The State I Am In
Friday, April 24th: Savvy Verse and Wit
Tuesday, April 28th: Clever Girl Goes Blog
Thursday, April 30th: Estella’s Revenge
Anna says
This one sounds good!
Literary Feline says
I’m with Anna, this does sound like a wonderful collection of short stories.
Wendy says
Oh, this sounds wonderful. I’d love to tour this book 🙂
Karen Haney says
My blog is just finding itself and will be 3 months old on Monday. I would love to host my first tour with Ms. Brady’s book. I have been successfully reviewing books for almost a year. I am a 37 year veteran Reading teacher who is retiring to spend my time with my greatest passions-reading and writing. I have already been asked to be an expert contributor to a soon to be released book for authors. I have sought out on my own authors, made connections and gotten reviews, and formed relationships with several. HOUSE AND HOME was one of my very first reviews and very well received by VOICE and Kathleen McCleary. Please consider me for a stop on the tour. Thank you.