2011 Short Fiction Award Winner
selected by Antonya Nelson
5.5 x 8.5″ 16 pgs, hand coloring, hand stitched
ISBN: 978-1-888553-51-2
“Have you seen an episode where Carrie steps out of her brownstone or onto a dance floor, and swings her gaze all around her like, I’m the shit? People are looking at her, and she knows. She’s loving it. I got out of my cab just like that. And here came a man with biceps like billiard balls under his sleeves; he swiveled his head as he passed. The next one—Billy Idol hair and a jaw you could cut yourself on—checked me out, too. I just smiled. With one or the other, with someone like them, our time would come soon enough. But first, more eye contact and flirting, a couple of drinks, dancing close. Everything I had been missing. I fired up a Camel and leaned on a building—bar or club, or restaurant with lowered lights? Whatever it was, it teemed with young men, beautiful men, men appropriate for me.”
The Death of Carrie Bradshaw was chosen by judge Antonya Nelson as the winner of the 2011 Kore Press Short Fiction Chapbook Award.
“Patricia King shows us a character haunted by the past and coming to terms with the complicated present. Smart, empathetic, and humane, this is a terrific debut by a writer with a very bright future.” —Alix Ohlin, author of The Missing Person, Babylon and Other Stories, Signs and Wonders, and Inside
“By turns thrilling, tender, surprising, and hilarious, King reveals a spellbinding psychological portrait, the complexities of the relationships that define our lives, and their potential to make us come undone.” —Patricia Engel, author of the Pen / Hemingway Award Finalist Vida
“The Death of Carrie Bradshaw is a story full of humor, insight, an act of god, and a great cast of major and minor characters. A rarity in short fiction, it manages to feel uplifting at closure without one unearned moment. A treat.” —Antonya Nelson, contest judge, author of Some Fun, In the Land of Men, and Bound