Stay Awake: Stories
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. --Leah Strauss