In fewer than 150 pages, Rebecca Schiff’s collection, THE BED MOVED, offers over 20 short stories thematically held together by ideas about sex and sexuality, failed relationships, family, loss and longing. For Schiff, these themes are all part of a larger exploration of identity via a narrow but sharp perspective. Each short story here is very short, but powerful, complicated and absorbing nonetheless.

The book opens and then closes with pieces that are just barely stories at all. “The Bed Moved” and “Write What You Know” are more like summary statements giving the reader insight into the narratives found between them. “The Bed Moved” introduces the literal and figurative bed that seems to symbolize the type of woman Schiff writes about. This woman is inviting and open with her body and her sexuality, but also neurotic, smart, introspective and a bit lonely. We will meet her again and again, at different ages and in different scenarios in these stories. She is the not-wholly committed girlfriend brought home to family in the hilariously uncomfortable “Welcome Lilah.” She is the Rebecca in “Third Person,” always sleeping with someone else’s boyfriend. But that is not to say that these stories and characters are one-note.

"THE BED MOVED is a quick and smart collection. Readers will devour it and come back to savor it on subsequent readings."

“Longviewers” presents a family --- a mother, father and teenage daughter --- consumed with changing traffic patterns in their suburban neighborhood. What starts as small-scale community activism becomes an obsession for the father, and his daughter watches him become increasingly anxious and hostile. Before her eyes, he is transformed from a heroic figure to a sad one, yet her love and even admiration for him remains strong. “http://www.msjiz/boxx374/mpeg” is also about parents and one’s perception of them. Here a young woman mourns, along with her mother, the death of her father. When using his computer, she comes across a soft porn video that shifts her understanding of him, her mother and her own grief. “Another Cake” finds another young woman dealing with the death of her father. Suffocated by the full house during the Jewish funerary rituals of “shiva,” she retreats upstairs, outside and into memory.

There are lighter pieces as well. “Communication Arts” is a series of increasingly tense and hilariously frustrating emails from an idealistic English professor to her manipulative and spoiled students, and then eventually her dean. These stories are all nuanced and interesting, with complex characters and a clean writing style. Schiff balances a playfulness and dark humor with a deadly seriousness as the actions and thoughts of her characters often mask or downplay an emotional depth and sorrow. Each piece is powerful, and many are ribald. Schiff is totally at ease tackling issues of sexuality, gender and entangled relationships, as well as the difficult development of “self” for young women.

THE BED MOVED is a quick and smart collection. Readers will devour it and come back to savor it on subsequent readings.