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Loading... Stay Awake: Stories (edition 2012)by Dan Chaon (Author)
Work InformationStay Awake by Dan Chaon
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. It's official: Dan Chaon is one of my favorite authors. This collection includes some previously published (McSweeney's, Mid Atlantic) and newly seen stories; each one stellar; each one the kind of story/writing that makes me set the book down when finished in an attempt to stay in that space where an excellent story takes you. There's a feeling of displacement that flows through every story; ordinary people in ordinary days, but something is just slightly off in their lives. Love love love his writing. Also, I am super excited to be able to pronounce his name: "shawn." You would not believe how mungled I made his name when I attempted to say it. This was a truly wonderful collection of short stories. I was impressed with Dan Chaon's ability to use simple language to tell mesmerizing stories. It was also a pretty varied collection of stories. Some of them were downright scary and others were haunting while others played with my mind. What I really appreciated was a true collection of horror stories of different degrees. I had been looking for something like this and felt that most books that were billed as scary or horror fell short of the mark. no reviews | add a review
AwardsDistinctions
"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"--Provided by publisher. No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumDan Chaon's book Stay Awake was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Read this at night and it was a very strange counterpoint to my days - being a tourist at Disney World.
Chaon pulls you right into the dark headspace of his characters and makes you feel their sadness. ( )