In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

13are 13vxe:r SALLIE BINGHAM Born in 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky, Sallie Bingham is a novelist, short story writer, playwright, and noted patron of the arts. She attended The Collegiate School for Girls and Ballard High School in Louisville, and then moved to Massachusetts in 1954 to study at Radcliffe College. After earning a degree in English in 1958, she married Whitney Ellsworth, later a cofounder of The New York Review ofBooks, and lived in Boston and New York. She divorced and remarried in the 1960s, a decade that produced many of her short stories. Following a second divorce, Bingham returned to Louisville in 1977 and remarried in the early 1980s. There she served as book editor for The Courier-journal and taught creative writing at the University of Louisville. In 1986 she established the Kentucky Foundation for Women and launched its quarterly journal, The American Voice. Bingham has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, since 1991. Among her nine books to date are After Such Knowledge (1960), Passion and Prejudice: A Family Memoir (1989), Small Victories (1992), and Straight Man: A Novel (1996). Her plays include Milk ofParadise (1980) and Paducah (1985). She has published two short story collections, The TouchingHand (1967) and The mty It Is Now (1972). James R. Frakes, writing in The New York Times Book Review, has noted that Bingham's power, like that of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty, comes from her "unblinkinggaze." Her stories have appeared in TheAtlanticMonthly, Mademoiselle, Redbook, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere and have been reprinted in 0. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories. The final story in The Touching Hand, "Bare Bones" first appeared in Redbook in 1965 and was honored the following year in 0. Henry Prize Stories. It is a gripping portrayal of loneliness, obsession, and private revelation. • Lilly Morrison had been divorced for almost a year. In the beginning she had wanted it, impatient of delays, as though the divorce -were her reward for three years of marriage. But when the reward fell due and she was finally alone, she almost regretted it. Not him-she seldom thought of him, her gentle, dark husband. Him she did not even miss. But for a long time she felt lost without the life he had provided BARE BoNES 111 for her. There was suddenly so much space around her, there were such lengths of time, and her efforts to do something about it-to buy curtains or take her child to the zoo or invite friends to dinner-sank into the void without leaving a trace. She cried while she washed the dishes from her little parties, for none of it seemed substantial, none of it took up any space; and the people who had been so kind to her at dinner disappeared into their own lives as soon as the door was closed. She began to feel that she herselfwas disappearing, as though she had existed only as a fixed bright image in her husband's nearsighted brown eyes. She began to be curious about him, as though he had taken away a part of herself, a secret quality on which her vitality depended. Ofcourse she was not curious about him, but rather about what he had taken away. She could not remember ever having been curious about Jay Morrison. He had followed her too closely for that. She had never caught sight ofhim across that space which separated her from men who did not want her. Jay had always been so close. Only now, alone, in the waste ofher life, she began to wonder about him, and even to be angry. It seemed unfair that he had drawn off so much of her strength. How could she have known he had that power? He had never shown it before; only in leaving had he stripped her to the bone. She kept hearing from sly friends that he was going out with this woman or that, that he was giving parties. And she grew more curious about him, and more angry, as though he were living on her happiness. It had been part of the agreement that Jay would see their little boy Willy every Saturday. Lilly felt the arrangement was for Jay's sake, rather than for Willy's. The child was mercifully vague about his father-fond ofhim, but lightly attached. He had scarcely known him before the break. Jay, however, seemed to feel that his self-respect depended on his connection with...

Share