num_pages: 254
description: 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 disconnectionand find themselves in unexpected dire and sometimes unfathomable situations.A fathers life is upended by his sons night terrorsand 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 noteson dollar bills inside a magazine stapled to the side of a tree; and a college dropout begins to suspect that theres something off something sinister in his late parents house.Dan Chaons stories feature scattered families unfulfilled dreamers anxious souls. They exist in a twilight realmin 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.
language: English
title: Stay Awake
publisher: Ballantine Books