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Title: StayAwake: Stories
Author: Dan Chaon
Review: At first I thought that this was going to be a bunch of horror stories, not my favorite. Well I was pleasantly surprised because I love psychological thinky stories. The book progresses through each giving you something to contemplate. Did it really happen the way the character viewed it or are they just crazy?
Short stories are fun in the fact that you can read them all in one setting and not have to remember what was going on when you pick up the book again. I enjoyed these stories and really thought lots about them, especially the ones that confused me.
This is not horror, but they do have the power to keep you awake thinking.
Publisher: Expected publication: February 7th 2012 by Ballantine Books
ISBN: 9780345530370
Copyright: 2012
Pages: 224
Quick Review: 3 stars (out of 5)
Why I Read It: I won this on Goodreads First-reads.
Synopsis: Before the critically acclaimed novels Await Your Reply and You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon made a name for himself as a renowned writer of dazzling short stories. Now, in Stay Awake, Chaon returns to that form for the first time since his masterly Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award.
In these haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss, grief or loneliness, displacement or disconnection—and find themselves in unexpected, dire, and sometimes unfathomable situations.
A father’s life is upended by his son’s night terrors—and disturbing memories of the first wife and child he abandoned; a foster child receives a call from the past and begins to remember his birth mother, whose actions were unthinkable; a divorced woman experiences her own dark version of “empty-nest syndrome”; a young widower is unnerved by the sudden, inexplicable appearances of messages and notes—on dollar bills, inside a magazine, stapled to the side of a tree; and a college dropout begins to suspect that there’s something off, something sinister, in his late parents’ house.
Dan Chaon’s stories feature scattered families, unfulfilled dreamers, anxious souls. They exist in a twilight realm—in a place by the window late at night when the streets are empty and the world appears to be quiet. But you are up, unable to sleep. So you stay awake.
Author Biography: Dan Chaon is the author of Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing. His new novel, Await Your Reply, will be published in late August 2009.
Other Reviews:
Love the phrase "thinky" stories :)
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