Really looking forward to getting this book. Dan Chaon is one of the finest writers working today.
‘Stay Awake’: Stories On Grief And Everything After : NPR.
Grieving is a series of a million heartbreaks. Every morning, you wake, temporarily freed of the memory of what you’ve lost, only to have the memory rush in and crush you all over again. Mourning meddles with sleep and thought; it makes an hour feel like a month, and a year seem like a lifetime. Most people survive it, but not without a sense of lost time — and that they have lost something of themselves along the way.
It’s that uneasy feeling, that sometimes blurry line between the dreaming and waking lives, that is the theme of Dan Chaon’s darkly beautiful short story collection Stay Awake. It almost reads like a novel in fragments. Although each story contains different characters, there’s an unsettling thematic commonality among them. People are lost — to car accidents, suicides or diseases — and their loved ones do their best to get by. Often unsuccessfully.
Akopos 