Stay awake
Subtitle: stories
By: Dan Chaon
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780345530370
Subjects: FICTION / Short Stories (single author); FICTION / Psychological; FICTION / Literary
Work titles: Short stories
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 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"--
Table of contents: title: The bees; title: Patrick Lane, flabbergasted; title: Stay awake; title: Long delayed, always expected; title: I wake up; title: To Psychic Underworld; title: St. Dismas; title: Thinking of you in your time of sorrow; title: Slowly we open our eyes; title: Shepherdess; title: Take this, Brother, may it serve you well; title: The Farm, the gold, the lily-white hands.