Stay Awake
Stories
By Dan Chaon
(Ballantine Books, Hardcover, 9780345530370, 272pp.)
Publication Date: February 7, 2012
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Compact Disc, MP3 CD
Categories: Short Stories (single author), Psychological, Literary
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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.
Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications; and Await Your Reply, which was a New York Times Notable Book and appeared on more than a dozen “Best of the Year” lists. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.
Praise for Stay Awake
"Chaon's command of language, and his empathy with his characters, leave you not shaking your head in disbelief, but simply, gratifyingly, shaken."—WSJ.com
"The best of [Chaon's] stories arouse a feeling of deep foreboding...This is the great guilty pleasure of good horror fiction: the moment when the monstrosity at the heart of the story's darkness suggests itself to the eager imagination, while still witholding its true shape. Stay Awake is a superbly disquieting demonstration of that uneasy power."—The New York Times Book Review
"If Chaon's 2001 novel Among the Missing, which was nominated for a National Book Award, contained some of the best fiction writing in the past twenty years, Stay Awake is its darker, more unsettling cousin."—Esquire
"[Chaon] is a master of psychological tension....These stories demand and capture your attention, and they don’t let go even after you’ve finished reading them."—The Miami Herald
"It's only February but with the release of Dan Chaon's Stay Awake, what could be the year's best story collection is already on the shelf. This collection is further proof that Chaon is one of the best fiction writers working right now and a master of the short story form."—The Omaha World-Herald
"Moving...Dan Chaon deliver[s] some of the best of what contemporary short fiction has to offer."—BookPage
"Chaon has a knack for the dramatic…but there’s more than a beguiling premise animating these stories. His real quarry is the pervasive nature of trauma’s aftermath."—Time Out New York
“With this arresting collection, Chaon again demonstrates his mastery of the short story. . . . Chaon 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.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Praise for Among the Missing
“Unforgettable . . . hums with life and wry humor . . . The stories sneak resolutely up on you, like new weather that hits before you know it.”—The New York Times Book Review
“One of those writers who possess an uncanny and seemingly otherwordly understanding of the human condition . . . Chaon [is] a remarkable chronicler of a very American kind of sadness, much in the tradition of Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, and Denis Johnson. . . . These stories are to be savored.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Praise for You Remind Me of Me
“Remarkable . . . weaves the threads into a whole that is not only satisfying but devastating.”—Entertainment Weekly (Editor’s Choice)
“Extraordinary . . . renews my faith in the unique capacity of literature to help us understand and ultimately respect ourselves and the strange, baffling, complex figures we all can be.”—Houston Chronicle
Praise for Await Your Reply
“Stunning . . . Chaon succeeds in both creating suspense and making it pay off, but Await Your Reply also does something even better. Like the finest of his storytelling heroes, Mr. Chaon manages to bridge the gap between literary and pulp fiction with a clever, insinuating book equally satisfying to fans of either genre.”—The New York Times
“A riveting thriller, chock-full of plot twists, and a sober meditation on the erosion of identity in the age of technology . . . There’s a bristling momentum that develops, as in any great tale of suspense. . . . [Chaon] writes with an eloquence rarely seen in the world of page-turners.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
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