Death, Sleep & the Traveler
by John Hawkes
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The author of seven full-length novels, several plays, and numerous short fictions, John Hawkes over the course of two and a half decades has won international acclaim. Death, Sleep & The Traveler is about a middle-aged Dutchman, his dissolving marriage, his involvement in two sexual triangles, his obsession with the murder he is accused of having committed on a pleasure cruise. It is an exceptionally concise and beautiful work," writes the novelist-critic Jonathan Baumbach, "delicate, show more erotic, dreamlike - in all, a luminous novel by the richest prose stylist in American letters since Faulkner."" show lessTags
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Hawkes has written a poetic novel that drifts in/out of reality. Dreams, eroticism abound. Makes us realize how little we understand - even about ourselves.
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ThingScore 50
Death, Sleep and the Traveler and The Blood Oranges, striking, personal, and assured as they are, remain rather wispy works, have the air of dazzling exercises performed on the edge of nothing. The eerie, luminous images of these two books are lost in almost empty narrative space; great songs in search of an opera; brief poems looking for a play.
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Author Information

28+ Works 3,067 Members
Author John Hawkes was born in Stamford, Connecticut on August 17, 1925. During World War II, he joined the American Field Service and was an ambulance driver in Italy and Germany from the summer of 1944 to the summer of 1945. He taught at Brown University for thirty years. He wrote eighteen novels, four plays, and a volume of poetry during his show more lifetime. His first novel, The Cannibal, was published in 1949. His other works include The Lime Twig, The Beetle Leg, and Virginie: Her Two Lives. His novel Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade won France's Prix Medicis Étranger in 1986. He died on May 15, 1998. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Death, Sleep & the Traveler
- Original publication date
- 1974
- Dedication
- For Kitty and Philip Finkelpearl
- First words
- Ursula is leaving.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I am not guilty.
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 155
- Popularity
- 211,861
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.63)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 4
- ASINs
- 1


























































