Benched - Pivotal prose series Author:Cydney Chadwick A failed man haunted by his sucessful past, a woman whose academic career can't hide her alienation and loneliness, a thoughtless young man living for his next sexual conquest; in Cydney Chadwick's Benched, these people move through a world of sinister disconnections in search of something they don't understand and are never going to find. The b... more »ook presents a series of encounters loosely centered around trips to a Hyde Park Bench and a London laundromat at an undefined recent historical moment in which place and time have become empty measures of people's inevitable distance from each other. Benched is a minefield of awkward silences, crude gestures and small exquisite tortures. This understated and stylish novella presents the reader with a truly contemporary gothic, in which grand dramatic horror has given way to the horror hidden in apparently trivial daily moments broken off from each other like bright, sharp fragments of an imperceptible dark structure of dis! solution and, possibly, death« less