The Bed Moved

by Rebecca Schiff

A New Yorker, trying not to be jaded, accompanies a cash-strapped pot grower to a 'Clothing Optional Resort' in California. A nerdy high schooler has her first sexual experience at geology camp. On the night of her father's funeral, a college student watches an old video of her Bat Mitzvah, hypnotized by the image of the girl she used to be . . .

Frank and irreverent, these stories offer a singular view of growing up (or not) and finding love (or not) in today's uncertain landscape

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Humor, Adult, Adult Fiction

144 pages, Paperback

First published April 12, 2016

About the author

Rebecca Schiff is the author of The Bed Moved, a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her stories have appeared in n+1, Electric Literature, Fence, Guernica, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, Lenny Letter, and The Best Small Fictions 2017. She lives in Kingston, NY.

Reviews

[Michelle Hart · Rating 2 out of 5]

ugh.

listen, i'm a twenty-something jewish girl--and only child--obsessed with sex and parental loss. this book should have been my everything. instead it left me scratching my head. it reminded me of lauren holmes' collection, barbara the slut, from last year: anesthetized anecdotes that evoke significant ideas without rendering them in meaningful ways.

these aren't 'stories' so much as they are 'vaguely related punchlines that don't add up to anything.' there are some choice lines here, but since i am not in an MFA program, i don't care about THE SENTENCE as much as rebecca schiff wants me to. the prose is so affectless that it doesn't actually affect the reader. hemingway and hempel write minimally because their subjects are so maximal; they aren't simply writing about the minutiae of daily life as a middle class white girl in brooklyn. indeed, the only time schiff's book comes alive is when the narrator is talking about her dead father.

nothing in these 160 pages satisfies, and throughout my reading i wondered whether that was the point: to provide the reader with some preening, quasi-clever observations that leave the reader pondering but far from gratified.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 4 out of 5]

23 Short stories .....for a total of 139 pages.

The very first story, (title story), "The Bed Moved", said more in 2 short pages than many 300 page novels.

Daring & Clever, ....
Universal themes: sex, relationships, sleeping around, pot, clothing optional resort, puberty-enhancing naps, school, calculators and cheating, cancer, parents, boyfriends, housekeepers, learning to drive, sex, death, desire, sex, family, growing up Jewish, causal heroism, mixing pain & humor.....weirdness....coolness, and tenderness.

A excerpt from the short story, "Write What You Know"
"I only know about parent death and sluttiness. What else do I know? I know about the psychology of Jewish people who have assimilated, who dye their hair, who worry about bizarrely specific allergies".
"I know about liberal guilt and sexual guilt and taking liberties sexually, even though I haven't actually done any of these liberties I know about, except once something with a very small dildo, it hardly counts. I know about unrequited love, and once love that was required, but not for very long. I know about baseball – – it didn't take long to learn it. I know about relief pictures, and which guy switch it. When you guys know other guys, they know something I'm left out of. Guys know about towels – – towels are a big part of how they know each other, in the locker rooms where they only use each other's last names. The first name is what the girlfriend calls them, when she calls them. She's got a ponytail, she's got boots, she's got chlamydia. No, she doesn't got chlamydia. She's got a mom and a dad and a bathroom at home with a rag on a toilet seat. She's got a ponytail."
"I don't know about the rug on the toilet seat. Jewish people who have
assimilated rarely keep rugs there."

Witty, Weird, Wonderful.....a writer with finesse!

[Dov Zeller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a first book of 23 short shorts (or at least, short-ish shorts, some shorter and some stingier than others) by a 'new' author. (That's what they say about people when they are just starting to publish, even if they've been writing for a while.)

The stories are sharp, observant, bleak but somehow, for lack of a better word, cute. Cute and acute. There is childish voice that is often speaking in a way which is too knowing for a child. Hard to explain, but it's a thing she does, and it can be catchy (often because it is barbed.)

Here is the opening of the second story "Longviewers":

Mommy and Daddy hate the other street. The other street used to be just another street, but now it wants to give us traffic, to cause us pain. Now Mommy and Daddy host meetings in our house like it's union times. If it were union times, we wouldn't have a house, or artichoke appetizers for the other angry people, but the spirit would be the same. I've never seen Mommy and Daddy so worked up. Usually they're at work. They just go to work and they hardly have friends. Not like me, who's always on the phone, dampening the little holes. They got me Line 2, and when it's for me, they yell, 'Line 2!" like it's my name. I never even noticed the traffic on our street. I don't even drive.

[end quote]

This paragraph is so jarring. It pushes and pulls. She invokes so many narrative moments at once, some distancing, some very close and intimate (the breath and the phone), and several perspectives in conflict with each other (those of the child and the adult in rapid succession).

A lot of painful humor in here about the everyday messiness, absurdity and disconnectiness of relationships (family, friends, lovers. No one is spared). but the way she serves it up it's like Shirley Temple's standing in front of you holding a platter of bonbons, but when you take one, it bites your finger off.

I like her narration style in Longviewers. Sometimes, in the book as a whole, I found this kind of narration to be brilliant, and sometimes I found it to be a bit grating. At times the rhythms got a little monotonous for me. But even in stories I wasn't as drawn to, the observations of human relationships were compelling.

This isn't sentimental stuff, but it doesn't downplay our need for human connection. On the contrary, everyone is trying to find each other, but things get in the way (self-absorption; emotional insobriety; lack of mutual attraction; the difficulty of coming across someone who travels in the same emotional universe.)

A shout out to Elyse who's description of this book is spot on:

"Universal themes: sex, relationships, sleeping around, pot, clothing optional resort, puberty-enhancing naps, school, calculators and cheating, cancer, parents, boyfriends, housekeepers, learning to drive, sex, death, desire, sex, family, growing up Jewish, causal heroism, mixing pain & humor.....weirdness....coolness, and tenderness."

Here's a link to Elyse's review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been waiting on this collection since 2006 when I read three stories in an issue of n + 1, which I've kept all these years. The wait was long but it was worth it. The Bed Moved ranks in my top-five all time favorites.

[Rachel B. Glaser · Rating 5 out of 5]

This unflinching and clever book of linked stories officially comes out on April 12th. Schiff's protagonist narrates the last two decades of her life with a detached, yet vulnerably honest voice. Fearlessly Schiff finds humor and sadness in death, sex, Geology camp, a funeral, a cancer blog, a parent's recent search history, a housekeeper's affair, a clothing optional hot spring experience, and every other moment and tradition Schiff narrows her eyes on. Each sentence rings with the humble, accumulating power of a heart beat. Needless to say, I'm a fan, and hope Schiff has another book out soon!

[Tamsen · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 stars.

Man, this book tried really, really hard to be deep.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schiff's debut short story collection focuses on what it's like to be a privileged young Jewish woman. You may think *snore* like I first did, because who needs another short story collection about being white and young and female? But this collection has a lot more weight to it than I was expecting.

The stories themselves are often very short, like flash-fiction short, and this is a good thing. It made the collection move along at a quick pace. No single story is longer than ~10 pages, and that is a great thing for me in any short story collection. I appreciate longer fiction, but when I pick up a short story collection, I'm always taken aback by the author's choice of including a novella-length story. I read this collection in mostly one sitting.

Schiff's writing is raw. She uses very precise language and grammar to convey her stories. Most of the stories read like disjointed stream of consciousness, but not in an off-putting way, at least for me. Her narrators are blunt and snide. They are honest and cynical, yet not too much.

Thematically, Schiff focuses on the lives of young women, which often encompasses dating culture, sex, and relationships. Yet Schiff also gives a lot of air time to deeper struggles with body image, feminism, women finding their place in modern society, and losing a family member to cancer. The cancer stories hit me like a punch in the gut because of how perceptive they are.

She uses her narrators to make astute, blunt observations about human character, sex, dating, societal norms and judgment, and modern culture (particularly consumerism). Her precise observations were often unique but usually resonated. I don't think Schiff has a lot of sympathy for her narrators or characters, as many of them weren't particularly likable, but I think she did an excellent job of conveying the quandaries of being a young or new adult. There were lots of moments where I went, "Yep, I know that guy. And yep, that's exactly how things work, even if I hate it."

Overall, I recommend this collection. As with all collections, some stories are better than others, and this is not the most diverse collection of stories I've ever read. Yet Schiff's blunt honesty about modern society kept me turning the pages quickly. It reminds me a lot of Barbara the Slut and Other People, which I read earlier this year, but this collection is snappier and better in my opinion while covering many of the same themes. I look forward to reading more of Schiff's work.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really just felt like I was reading snippets from the same story over and over again. All the characters were so similar I had a hard time remembering if a story had ended or if I was still reading the same one. That said, there are one or two really interesting bits in here - the less narrative and shorter ones really showed her talent. As a whole though, this collection is lackluster and too unvaried to make a real impression.

[Sheri · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think one of the reasons I don't like short story collections in general is that I feel compelled to write a review addressing each story. This collection has 23 stories, one of which is only half of a page long and so I am freeing myself of my compulsion, possibly as a result my rating is slightly inflated (I was bordering on 3 or 4 stars and ended up granting the 4).

It is a short story collection, but the voice is so similar throughout that it could be a collection of stories about the same person; i.e. a novel. In a slightly ironical note, the last story of the book (entitled Write What You Know) begins: "I only know about parent death and sluttiness." Most of the stories are about a promiscuous woman and/or a woman who has lost her father to cancer. So, yeah...they are slightly autobiographical quips that hold together well.

None of the stories particularly stuck out, but there were a few interesting comments throughout, some of which are very tongue-in-cheek:
"Violence might mean something other than violence, too, at this college. I always thought violence meant a punch in the face, a knife to the throat, but the students at this college meant whenever you felt violated. That could be anytime."
"The housekeeper is not fat but she is not thin. She's the right weight for a husband to start ignoring her and another man to still notice."
"Like a hooker, eye contact and hand holding had become a bigger deal to me than sex itself. Except I wasn't paid not to have feelings. I had broken my own spirit for free."
"when it was in me the third time, and no longer hurt at all, I understood everything for a second....that it could go back to a life outside me--get blow jobs in Oaxaca, intern at the ACLU--but I'd never go back to not understanding"

[Jaclyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Schiff gives you a lot to love here and these stories are my kind of stories. Reminiscent of Lauren Holmes's Barbara the Slut and Katherine Heiny's Single, Carefree, Mellow this collection has it all. It's up there with You Should Pity Us Instead as my short story collection of the year.

[Julene · Rating 2 out of 5]

If only the stories had been stories and not passing bits leftover from an MFA program...

[AdiTurbo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Luckily I am Gen X and not a Millennial, so I don't have to hear about how this book is "the voice of my generation." If this was what my life was really like, I think I would want to end it. No soul, just sex and drugs and STDs. No emotional attachment to anything or anyone. This is more of how Baby Boomers look at Millennials than what they're really like. What anyone is like. The stories are boring, revolving around the same themes, never offering any deeper layers of meaning or reaching larger-picture philosophical understandings. What you see is what you get, and what you see is not pretty. It's hollow, alienated, cold. I know so many people these ages that are nothing like the people in these stories. If I were them I'd be insulted.

[juliemcl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of short stories taught me a lot about growing up as a bookish girl in middle-class suburban New Jersey during the eighties/nineties.... Oh, no, wait. I already knew all about that. Really, I enjoyed the book a lot during the first third or so. Then it got a little same-ground-tready, which she sort of addresses in the last two-pager called "Write What You Know." Thankfully the book is short. She works with words playfully in a way that reminded me of Loorie Moore, but... there's a way to do funny, playful and ironic but ALSO include more depth, humanity, profundity (see George Saunders, Kelly Link, etc.). This felt too shallow, too MFA-y. Nevertheless, she is talented and I think we will see more depth of experience from this writer in the future.

[Morgan Schulman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel about this the way I feel about all books like this. Some of the stories are really enjoyable. Some of them are really tiresome. No one needs a whole book of it. The genre was much more fresh and invigorating back in the early 90s when I first started reading story collections like this. Maybe I just need to stop reading them altogether, maybe being an English major in the 90s tapped me out to this sort of thing.

[Josie · Rating 5 out of 5]

everything i want to say has already been said, apparently

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book opens with FOUR pages blurbling all over themselves, so I won't do more here than mostly agree: it is a promising debut, (almost too) witty and well-written, intelligent and perceptive. I enjoy writers who can stun you with the direction a sentence takes or with a verb choice that takes a beat to sink in. The danger I see on the horizon, however, is that of sinking into the merely sarcastic ADHD-addlepated tone endemic to angsty teenage romcoms freelanced by fuming underemployed rapidly aging English majors. Cleverness isn't even half of it.

[Nate Kowal · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Bed Moved was full of punchy lines (fully of shock value and little substance, well written sentences, that felt sterile and without emotion. The stories were to read as sad but instead felt numb.

This collection, of short stories, wasn't for me. It seems that there are those out there whose boxes are checked by this book; I was left scratching my head.

Let's start off with what I liked. I liked Schiff's short, clipped, stream of conscious style of writing. The sentences, as considered by a former english major, are well written. That was it. That was all that was good.

While those sentences might have been individually well-written, the stories felt like they were being told by an outside observer. Schiff's characters felt like intruders in their own stories. Everything felt detached. While it might be an unfair assumption - this could be the author's way of coping with death - to me it came off as without emotion. I couldn't feel for any of the, vastly similar, characters. I just felt angry, like I would never want to know these people. Worst of all, maybe, was that the stories didn't really feel like stories - none of them knew how to end (if there were endings at all). The best ending belonged to 'Sports Night' because at least it felt like something had transpired.

The best story was 'Another Cake'. It was a story about the passing of her father. It felt the most real - the most reliable and the least sterile - though it was still a story with no conclusion. And maybe that is me being unfair, again, maybe I missed the theme of the whole book (Life doesn't have a satisfying conclusion and despite the events that transpire in our lives nothing has a satisfying beginning, middle or end.) but I couldn't relate. I wanted (or expected) to read a collection of short stories, not a collection of flash in the pan quips that, mostly, fall flat.

This collection isn't something that I'll mind forgetting.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some like it hot, some like it short. I like both, and Rebecca Schiff delivers hot, short stories that are also weird and funny in her debut collection THE BED MOVED. My God, I want to go out with this book! You will, too, after sampling just the opening lines of some of her stories: “Rebecca had sex recently, but she forgot,” “The ad said, ‘I will rate your vagina,’ so I sent it in” or “She slept with men who only wanted to play Settlers of Catan.” Not all the stories are about sex, but most of them are. What, is that going stop you from reading? You’d be making a big mistake. Schiff’s stories grab you from the front and poke you in the rear. She has style and titled structural sense that is fresh even as it reminds me of Donald Barthelme, though different. Are you still reading this? What’s wrong with you? Schiff made your bed, now read in it!

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd like to review this if I can get my act together because this slim collection (due out in April) is truly astonishing: brilliant, hilarious, and human to the core. How Schiff accomplishes so much through such short pieces is nothing short of genius. Take in her huge talent in one sitting then revisit again, again, and again.

[Keith Rosson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know I'm pretty late to this party, but yeesh, Rebecca Schiff's THE BED MOVED is brilliant. Terse, nimble, and fucking hilarious collection, even as it tackles some brutal subjects. Stunning sentences. I could live to be a million years old and never write this well. Recommended.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading a couple of the shorter stories in this book in the bookstore, I thought I'd love this book-- the voice is distinctive, flat and with an arch but limited syntax, and the stories seemed funny but bruised. Reading it at home, though, I found those skills not enough to sustain a whole collection, even a short one like this. The voice, and some of the situations (let's say sleeping with men who have girlfriends, or a dead parent) seemed repetitive and not turned to new subjects. Dating seemed, for most of the book, to be the only thing going on, the only thing that mattered. There were some other stories, with younger narrators, where the flat-arch voice made the protagonists seem like they might be autistic... Toward the end of the book, there were a couple stories that took on different subjects, and I thought they were enjoyable. I think in a magazine, many of the stories collected here would, individually, dazzle me.

This will seem callous, given how close these stories play with the idea that they are all about the author, but I kept waiting for the story about the death of the narrator's father-- what was it like waiting for him to die? How did grief change things after the weekend he was laid to rest? These questions lurk behind the collection, and maybe exploring them would provide the variety I think this book would benefit from.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

smart, funny, cutting, sarcastic, I did feel at times it was a little glib, but it has a 'Lorrie Moore' depth hidden under all the throwaway stuff. Well, sometimes. Mainly about pre-Uni/Uni/post-Uni life it tackles such modern problems as a 'Rate my vagina' website (her breasts get an 8), coming across her father's porn predilection after his death and visiting a clothes optional hot spring. I was going to give it three stars but have found myself wanting to quote it a lot, so will up it to 4, and add some quotes below later (book not with me now)..

Make porn, not war

(College is) - Nietzsche and penetration

She’s the right weight for a husband to start ignoring her and another man to still notice.

[Bookforum Magazine]

"I loved The Bed Moved. I love the traditions of narrative obsession, syntactic contortion, and blurt-it-out black humor from which it springs.

Schiff's characters can never fully drive into remission through their self-awareness or their ironizing, what one character calls "the gallows humor of the coffee-brewing class."

So much darkness delivered in such consistent doses risks habituation, but Schiff keeps things lively with her fearlessness and/or shamelessness and/or fearlessness of shame."

–Justin Taylor on Rebecca Schiff's The Bed Moved in the Summer 2016 issue of Bookforum

To read the rest of this review, go to Bookforum:
http://bookforum.com/inprint/

[Odessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Initially reminded of Lydia Davis, but soon, I acknowledged this author's distinctive voice--neurotic and unsettling, which should mean good-- is not like Davis's. What the author aimed might fall somewhere between prose poems and explosive short stories, some could be flash fiction just as many people call nowadays. As short stories, however, their premise--or themes, sets, material --rendered too uninteresting to my taste, at least to like enough. The good thing was that I could finish without liking it.

The author could possibly be promising in her poetry gear, although these poetry potentials in the collection still fall short for poems.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book a few weeks ago and I already don't remember the stories very well, only that they are extremely witty and barbed, cool to the point of coldness—and funny, in a cool/cold way. My favorite one is about a young woman who has a crush on a guy with cancer who is a real self-absorbed tool. My second favorite is about a young woman who has a brief relationship with a California guy and they go to a hippie hot spring, because it's obvious that the hippie hot spring in the story is Harbin, and I've been there.

[Saxon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Schiff is a Grace Paley for the modern day with a little Lorrie Moore to boot. Honest and witty, the stories told (mostly) first-person from a twenty-something female narrator are full of neurosis, sex, death and weirdo boyfriends. Each story is bite-size but not without depth due to Schiff's use of language which will runs circles around you. Fast read and definitely worth it.

[Anisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really hoping to like this book. I'd seen so many great things about how great and funny it was but I was overall pretty disappointed. There were a few stories toward the end that I really did enjoy but the first several stories were difficult for me to get into. The stories, to me, were more clever than funny overall.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collection of (often very) short stories that really have no cohesion and are sometimes a little repetitive like the author can't let go of certain motifs-- but that I loved and just devoured and wished was 3x longer.

[Kirsten · Rating 3 out of 5]

An irreverent collection of short stories (and flash fiction) about growing up, the ennui of adolescence and burgeoning sexual expression. Perhaps not as consistent or cohesive as some similar collections but there was some inspired writing here.

[Bonnye Reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

GAB I read several of the stories in this compilation through Penguin Random House's Season of Stories. Rebecca Schiff is an excellent addition to my list of must-read short story authors - thank you for sharing her work with me.