Sleepless Nights - (New York Review Books Classics) by Elizabeth Hardwick (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life--the parade of people, the shifting background of place--and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick's finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.

Review Quotes

"[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

About the Author

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. A recipient of a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the author of three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays. She was a co-founder and advisory editor of The New York Review of Books and contributed more than one hundred reviews, articles, reflections, and letters to the magazine. NYRB Classics publishes Sleepless Nights, a novel, and Seduction and Betrayal, a study of women in literature.

Geoffrey O'Brien's books include The Browser's Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading, The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the Twentieth Century, and Dream Time: Chapters from the Sixties. He is editor in chief of the Library of America.