Sleepless Nights

Review Sleepless Nights assembles a series of fleeting images and memories united by the high intelligence and beauty of Hardwick's prose. ― Sally Rooney An encounter with a formidable mind .Her empathy, and sympathy, for the harshly endured lives of many of the women her gaze falls upon is without question . Beautifully, humanely, drawn. ― Eimear McBride A shattered meditation on a life ... Extraordinary and haunting. ― Joan Didion Hardwick's shimmering melancholia [is] my book of the year. It's a dream slideshow ... of lasting beauty that guides you through the mysteries, and tragedies of people the narrator has known and loved: the literary equivalent of polished onyx. -- James Clarke (The Guardian's Best Books of 2019) Brilliant, brittle and strange, unlike any preconceived notion I had of what a novel could be ... Few new books have felt so revolutionary or so brave. ― Lauren Groff A novel of mental weather that enchants by the scrupulousness and zip of the narrative voice, its lithe, semi-staccato descriptions and epigrammatic dash. ― Susan Sontag A hard, glinting, sophisticated, switched-on female inteligence ... Hardwick shocks with the truth: it runs like bond through her every sentence. ― Deborah Levy This original novel does everything for lost times that an irreplaceable family photograph album does - except that here, the words are worth a thousand pictures. ― Philip Roth 'At the best of times, life can feel fragmented and plotless. And yet reading novels, you'd think we all flitted from neat little episode to neat little episode. Praise, then, the gloriously plotless novel, represented best by Sleepless Nights. The essential book, first published in 1979, traces the days of a female writer at a distance from her audience. But it moves like a ballet more than a novel, delicate and yet dazzling, and never afraid of pinning down the inscrutability of life.' ― AnOther Magazine Product Description Sally Rooney: 'A series of fleeting images and memories ... united by the high intelligence and beauty of Hardwick's prose.' Rediscover a lost American classic: Sleepless Nights, a kaleidoscopic scrapbook of one woman's memories, here reissued with a new introduction by Eimear McBride. I am alone here in New York, no longer a we ... First published in 1979, Sleepless Nightsis a unique collage of fiction and memoir, letters and essays, portraits and dreams. It is more than the story of a life: it is Elizabeth Hardwick's experience of womanhood in the twentieth century. Escaping her childhood home of Kentucky, the narrator arrives at a bohemian hotel in Manhattan filled with 'drunks, actors, gamblers ... love and alcohol and clothes on the floor.' Here begin the erotic affairs and dinner parties, the abortions and heartbreaks, the friendships and 'people I have buried'. Here are luminous sketches of characters she has met that illuminate the era's racism, sexism, and poverty. Above all, here is prose blurring into poetry, language to lose - and perhaps to find - yourself in. Society tries to write these lives before they are lived. It does not always succeed. Book Description Rediscover a lost American classic: Sleepless Nights, a kaleidoscopic scrapbook of one woman's memories, here reissued with a new introduction by Eimear McBride. About the Author Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) was one of the greatest intellectuals of her time. A co-founder of The New York Review of Books, she authored three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays, as well as contributing more than a hundred pieces to American publications. She was married to the poet Robert Lowell from 1949 to 1972. Eimear McBride grew up in the west of Ireland and trained at Drama Centre London. Her first novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thingtook nine years to find a publisher and subsequently received a number of awards, including the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, and the Goldsmit