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Loading... Sleepless Nights (1979)by Elizabeth Hardwick
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. To be plunged into again. Heard distantly of hardwick before but didn’t really know about her. The Kentucky grounding was a nice surprise. ( ) Slim yet dense. So much goes on yet nothing happens. There's a story somewhere yet there is no narrative. I'm just running out of conjunctions over here. It's obvious why this book is considered a seminal text among many of the authors that I love. The structure of Jenny Offill's Dept. Of Speculation is reminiscent of the random paragraphs in Sleepless Nights; there are tons of loose and fragmented thoughts with no sense of cohesion to the statements written just before. Rachel Cusk's protagonist in Outline also feels like the direct descendant of this novel in the sense that readers only learn about the narrators via their experiences with others. I even get some Maggie Nelson energy, but maybe I'm just grasping at straws. This didn't floor me like I hoped it would. If push came to shove I'd describe the plot as nonexistent and the writing as uneven, but I appreciate its wit, intelligence, and significance. OH - naming your protagonist after yourself? BALLER MOVE. Mother of autofiction ooooor? What a nugget of a book. A slender novella/with some semi-autobiographical elements, the narrator, who shares the name of the author, Elizabeth, is traversing her memories, talking out loud to herself and in letters, about the people who have peopled her life. Shifting across the years, making random or no links, this plotless character driven gem has some fine lines. It's tone is mostly brittle and cool, with some warmth here and there. The eye for detail is very sharp. Early on I almost felt what it was like to BE Billie Holiday.. This essay is what sent me there: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/29/eimear-mcbride-elizabeth-hardwick-...
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Sleepless Nights is a scrapbook of memories: the first pangs of sexual longing, Billie Holiday holding forth in a cheap hotel, and the swagger and heartbreak of New York City. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.52Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1900-1944LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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