How long does it take to read Women in Their Beds?
Gina Berriault
Women in Their Beds by Gina Berriault takes about 6 hours 16 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 16 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1996. 342 pages, about 94,050 words.
13 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours 27 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 16 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 55 minutes |
The page count is the median across 3 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Half the women in the world are right now in bed, theirs or somebody else's, whether it's night or day, whether they want to be or not...." In the title story of Gina Berriault's latest collection, an unsure young actress watches as wrenching changes take place, row upon row, bed upon bed, in the women's ward of a hospital where she fills in as a social worker. Finding there both kindness and harsh fate, she also discovers a reflection of her own life. Nine new stories are included in this collection of thirty-five. All are such models of economy that they seem almost telepathic. Berriault employs her vital sensibility - sometimes subtly ironic and sometimes achingly raw - to touch on the inevitability of suffering and the nature of individuality, daring to see into the essence of our predicaments. What moves us? What dictates our behavior? What alters us? These stories illustrate Berriault's depth of emotional understanding: the tragic loss of innocence in "The Stone Boy," where nine-year-old Arnold accidentally kills his brother with a shotgun; the pointed wit in "God and the Article Writer" where a man is first demeaned and then elated by his submission to the people he interviews.
Subjects: PEN/Faulkner Award Winner, Manners and customs, Fiction, Fiction, short stories (single author), Short stories, American Short stories
