Sleepless Nights

By Elizabeth Hardwick
Introduction by Geoffrey O'Brien

In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life—the parade of people, the shifting background of place—and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick's finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

Brilliantly poised and confidently daring, Sleepless Nights is a chin-up tightrope walk along the borderline between fiction and autobiography... it is graceful, laconic, and wise.
— Newsweek

This original novel does everything for lost times that an irreplaceable family photograph album does—except that here, the words are worth a thousand pictures.
— Philip Roth

An extraordinary and haunting book.
— Joan Didion, The New York Times Book Review

Nobody writing prose now gives me as much pleasure as Elizabeth Hardwick. She honors our language and enlivens our woe. Sleepless Nights is elegant, wise, tasty—a truly wonderful book.
— Susan Sontag

Also see:

Seduction and Betrayal By Elizabeth Hardwick Introduction by Joan Didion Seduction and Betrayal is a virtuoso performance, a major writer's reckoning with the relations between men and women, women and writing, writing and life.

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