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.”

"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

$10, 5.5 x 8.5" 32 pgs,

hand coloring, staple binding

"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."

Excerpt from The Death of Carrie Bradshaw

Patricia Grace King grew up in North Carolina and spent years in Guatemala and Spain.  She now lives in the Printers Row neighborhood of Chicago with her husband and teaches at North Central College.  She holds a PhD in English from Emory University and is an MFA candidate at the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. 

Her chapbooks, The Death of Carrie Bradshaw and Rubia, won the 2011 Kore Press Short Fiction Contest and the 2011 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Contest, respectively.  Her fiction has also appeared in Nimrod and the Santa Fe Writers’ Project.  She has received awards from the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Competition, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and the Dana Award for Short Fiction, as well as a grant from the Illinois Arts Council and a Pushcart Prize nomination. 

The Death of Carrie Bradshaw is part of Patricia’s linked story collection, Gringos in Paradise.