Available:*
Library | Collection | Collection | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Beale Memorial Library (Kern Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction | FIC CHAON DA Stay | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Dinuba Library (Tulare Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Fiction Area | FIC CHAON DAN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Sunnyside Branch Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction Area | CHAON DA Stay | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Terra Bella Library (Tulare Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Fiction Area | FIC CHAON DAN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Visalia Library (Tulare Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Fiction Area | FIC CHAON DAN | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The Washington Post * San Francisco Chronicle
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 unthinkab≤ 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.
Praise for Stay Awake
"Eerily beautiful . . . [Chaon] is the modern day John Cheever."-- Boston Sunday Globe
"Powerful and disturbing . . . The shocks in this collection are many."-- The Washington Post
"Chaon is able to create fully realized characters in mere pages. . . . This collection is further proof that Chaon is one of the best fiction writers working right now."-- Omaha World-Herald
"There are not many fiction writers who can do what Dan Chaon can do. . . . [He is] a literary force."-- The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Intense and suspenseful . . . a highly recommended work, not to be missed."-- Library Journa l (starred review)
"Mesmerizing . . . gripping, masterful fiction."-- The Plain Dealer
"Superbly disquieting."-- The New York Times Book Review
Author Notes
Dan Chaon is an author born and raised in Nebraska. He is a novelist who wrote "Among the Missing" which was a 2001 finalist for the National Book Award and named one of the year's ten best books by the American Library Association. His short stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthologies and The O. Henry Prize Stories. His 2017 novel "Ill Will" was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. It was also nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award and International Thriller Writers Award.
Chaon began his career as a professor at Oberlin College where he was the Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing. He retired in 2018 to fcous full-time on his writng. His third short story collection, Stay Awake, was a finalist for The Story Prize.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With this arresting collection, Chaon again demonstrates his mastery of the short story. In the hypnotic "The Bees," a young boy screams in his sleep for no reason; he's suffered no known distress. He doesn't even seem to be having nightmares. The boy's father, greatly disturbed, soon finds his own dark past threatening to overwhelm his present. In the title story, Zach and Amber's baby girl is born with an incompletely formed conjoined twin. When Zach narrowly survives death before a highly risky operation to separate the twins, this already fragile family is strained to the breaking point. An electrician named Critter, living with his young daughter in Toledo, Ohio, after the death of his wife, keeps found notes despite their troubling nature, in "To Psychic Underworld:." Chaon's protagonists are plagued by common traumas and struggle to rectify their decisions with the external forces of fate. More often than not, characters are stuck in an eddy that seems inescapable, yet which is also a moment's isolation from the surrounding flow. Chaon (Await Your Reply) brings readers fantastically close, slowly drawing them into the anxiety or loneliness or remorse of his characters, and building great anticipation for the twists to come. Agent: Noah Lukeman, Lukeman Literary Management. (Feb. 7) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Chaon's (Await Your Reply, 2009)newest enticing short story collection embraces unsettled moments in which lives shift and unfold. In To Psychic Underworld, Critter, a recently widowed husband left to raise his 1-year-old daughter, begins finding random handwritten notes on index cards, currency, inserts in magazines. As the notes appear more frequently, he is forced to come to terms with his wife's death as well as his place in the world. The haunting title story follows new parents Zach and Amy, whose daughter, Rosalie, is born with a parasitic twin. Tensions arise when Zach lands in the hospital after a near-fatal car accident and surgery to remove Rosalie's twin leads Zach into a cycle of doubts and what-ifs. Long Delayed, Always Expected finds 44-year-old January initiating a physical relationship with her brain-damaged ex-husband, Jeffrey, as a way to escape sullen thoughts about her life and the future. In The Bees, a son's sleep disorder becomes the catalyst for a father's reckoning of the past. Chaon's 12 tales deftly explore the reality and mystery of his characters' unmoored lives.--Strauss, Leah Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN his somber, beautifully constructed 2009 novel, "Await Your Reply," Dan Chaon presented three interlocking narratives, each involving a form of identity theft. Midway through, in a strangely haunting scene, a man and a woman are wandering the ruins of a drowned town: Nebraska's own Atlantis, the man calls it. A reservoir that once flooded the place has dried up. Old buildings, now exposed, are washed out and ghostly, standing derelict amid silt and scrub grass. In both that novel and this new collection of stories, much of the world has that same quality of erosion and insubstantiality. Even the people seem hollowed out, teetering on the verge of collapse. A curious aspect of the stories in "Stay Awake" is the recurring use Chaon makes of a few distinctive motifs. A man loses a finger in a fall from a ladder. Someone glimpses through a window a figure not of this world. A parent commits suicide. Children are deformed, abducted, sent away to foster families, even murdered. Yet the echoes within these narrative elements aren't evidence of creative limitation. The sense, rather, is of a narrow cluster of related ideas being urgently worked out. These stories feel as though they had been written fast, one after another, expressing with some urgency a closely related set of variations on a given theme. What is that theme? The destructive fallout of the fractured family. Typically in "Stay Awake," a hapless man, alone and far from secure in his existential moorings, finds himself in crisis. A picture is rapidly drawn of a world out of true, or a mind out of true, in a situation rich in the possibility of weirdness and horror. The loss of a child, a spouse or a parent is often a factor. In "To Psychic Underworld," an electrician called Critter has recently lost his wife. He moves with his small daughter to live with his sister in Toledo, where he becomes alert to his surroundings in a new way: "It was as if he were a long-dormant radio that had begun to receive signals." Critter begins to discover unsettling messages. "The grass had been worn off and it looked for a moment as if someone had printed something there. IM ... WATCHIN ... YVV." He finds a heap of table napkins in a fast-food restaurant, on each of which someone has written in ballpoint pen: "Please." A number of the stories end, as this one does, in a fraught atmosphere that portends imminent disaster. But the outcome is deferred, pushed back beyond the story's final page. For Critter, as for other characters in "Stay Awake," insanity probably looms. But confirmation or closure is possible only in the reader's imagination. It's a delicate effect, and not easy to pull off. In "Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted," a man named Brandon lives in the house he grew up in, his parents having died two years earlier. The house itself inspires disturbing memories: the parents committed suicide in their bedroom. Brandon discovered not their bodies but his mother's note, taped to the front door, which told him on no account to go upstairs: "Just call the police." To this unsettling circumstance are added further instances of a broken world: electrical outages and changing weather patterns. Much more disturbing is the inexplicable writing that appears on Brandon's flesh. A story so freighted with signifiers of impending catastrophe requires at least the suggestion of an outcome commensurate with the expectations it has aroused. In this regard the story fails. Yet a majority succeed. In "I Wake Up" a boy is sent to a foster family after his mother goes to prison. He moves in with a couple who have lost their 16-year-old son and sleeps in the dead boy's bed. As he grows up, his grip on reality loosens. The psychic trauma he's been carrying since childhood comes eerily into view, and at last we catch sight of it. In "St. Dismas," a young man rescues his ex-girlfriend's child because the mother is a meth addict. He's doing the right thing, but he can't handle the responsibility. The ending, although bleak, is perfect in its cold and shocking cruelty. Similarly, when the father in "Thinking of You in Your Time of Sorrow" fails to attend his baby's funeral his life begins to disintegrate. A terrible possibility dawns on him and he sees the shape of the burden he will carry through life. In each of these stories a morbid outcome is predictable, and the familiar patterns recur: a wretched childhood, an inability to find a home in the world, a bereavement, a failure of responsibility. Yet despite these familiar elements, Chaon consistently achieves an electric jolt of originality. The best of his stories arouse a feeling of deep foreboding. Then, with the reader's realization of what's about to emerge from the shadows, comes a shock of recognition. This is the great guilty pleasure of good horror fiction; the sickening moment when the monstrosity at the heart of the story's darkness suggests itself to the eager imagination, while still withholding its true shape. "Stay Awake" is a superbly disquieting demonstration of that uneasy power. A parent commits suicide. Children are deformed, abducted, sent away, even murdered.
Library Journal Review
National Book Award finalist Chaon follows up his critically acclaimed novel Await Your Reply with this disquieting collection of 12 stories. His characters are everyday people experiencing extreme emotional situations that pull them into a strange, shadowy otherworld. In "The Bees," five-year-old Frankie suffers from nightmares, while father Zach has dreams that feel like bees buzzing in his head about an ex-wife and son he deserted years ago. In "Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted," Brandon Fowler lives alone in a family house where his parents killed themselves; one night, he senses the house creeping in on him. In "Slowly We Open Our Eyes," brothers Smokey and Donnie O'Sullivan are traveling cross-country to their grandmother's funeral when they swerve to miss a deer and have an accident that changes everything. In the title story, Zach and Amber's new baby, Rosalie, is born with two heads. Soon after his daughter's birth, Zach is paralyzed in an auto accident and begins obsessing about the parasitic head. VERDICT The powerful writing in this intense and suspenseful collection draws us into the emotional maelstroms experienced by the characters. A highly recommended work, not to be missed. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/11.]-Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.