Sleepless Nights

Description

The narrator of Sleepless Nights is a woman piecing together her life from scraps. Those scraps include tent meetings in Kentucky, a seedy hotel in New York in the 1940s, a nightclub where Billy Holliday sings. There are newly divorced women taking each other's emotional temperature and several seductive men - especially a Dutch doctor who conducts his adulteries with domestic coziness. Above all, there is Hardwick's own unmistakable sensibility, one that delights in startling juxtapositions and the music of the American language.

Elizabeth Hardwick (born 1916) has been a frequent contributor to The Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, which she helped found in 1963. Her books include the novels The Simple Truth, The Ghostly Lover, and Sleepless Nights, the essay collection A View of My Own, and The Selected Letters of William James, for which she acted as editor.

"[T]he literary equivalent of polished onyx."-James Clarke, The Guardian "Brilliantly poised and confidently daring, Sleepless Nights is a chin-up tightrope walk along the borderline between fiction and autobiography . . . it is graceful, laconic, and wise." -Newsweek "This original novel does everything for lost times that an irreplaceable family photograph album does-except that here, the words are worth a thousand pictures." -Philip Roth "An extraordinary and haunting book." -Joan Didion, The New York Times Book Review "Sleepless Nights-a novel of mental weather-enchants by the scrupulousness and zip of the narrative voice, its lithe, semi-staccato descriptions and epigrammatic dash." -Susan Sontag, The New Yorker "Talk about exploding expectations of narrative, character, structure in a novel. It's such a brilliant, strange novel." - Nicole Krauss, The Guardian