The Bed Moved: Stories

Staff Top Fives 2017

Our favorite books of the year.

One of my favorite story collections ever. It pretty much caters to everything I like: short short stories, funny-as-hell descriptions of people, dazzling sentences, dark humor, unashamed sex, and an attitude that doesn't really give a fuck. These stories have velocity to spare and plunge you into these characters' weird and uncomfortable worlds. I highly recommend this to anyone who likes to laugh, and especially to fans of Sam Lipsyte. Recommended By Kevin S., Powells.com

The audacious, savagely funny debut of a writer of razor-sharp wit and surprising tenderness: a collection of stories that gives us a fresh take on adolescence, death, sex; on being Jewish-ish; and on finding one’s way as a young woman in the world.

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. A college student, on the night of her father’s funeral, watches a video of her bat mitzvah, hypnotized by the image of the girl she used to be . . .

Frank and irreverent, Rebecca Schiff’s stories offer a singular view of growing up (or not) and finding love (or not) in today’s ever-uncertain landscape. In its bone-dry humor, its pithy observations, and its thrilling ability to unmask the most revealing moments of human interaction—no matter how fleeting—The Bed Moved announces a new talent to be reckoned with.

Rebecca Schiff graduated from Columbia University’s MFA program, where she received a Henfield Prize. Her stories have appeared in n+1, Electric Literature, The American Reader, Fence, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn.

“Each story is a delight—drily funny, irreverent, original. But just as they’re refreshingly candid and witty—they are very witty—Schiff’s stories also offer tender, but stubbornly unsentimental emotional truths. The stories in this collection are interested only in being honest, and that means shedding light on grief, pride, promiscuity, and loneliness in ways that are surprising, funny, and frank . . . Here is the magic of Schiff: she offers aphorisms without waxing pretentious, and she delivers humor without devaluing the emotional concerns.” Electric Literature

“We’re in a golden age of young female writers who, when they wish to be, are powerfully, cleansingly, and sometimes bawdily funny. This is a post-Lorrie (Moore) and Lydia (Davis) generation . . . Irony and satire are only two of the tools in these writers’ kits, but they are crucial in their consistent drawing of blood. [Schiff’s] dark wit gives her stories genuine tensile strength . . . She dips into her own braininess as if it were a bottomless trust fund . . . Schiff has an almost Nabokovian boldness and crispness of phrase.” Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“A stellar collection, an Amy Schumer sketch as chewed up by Andrea Dworkin . . . Schiff writes slim, ice-pick stories about sex and death and nighttime cab rides, sharpened by humor and extreme candor.” Rebecca Makkai, New York Times Book Review