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.
[T]he literary equivalent of polished onyx.
—James Clarke, The Guardian
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
Sleepless Nights—a novel of mental weather—enchants by the scrupulousness and zip of the narrative voice, its lithe, semi-staccato descriptions and epigrammatic dash.
—Susan Sontag, The New Yorker
Talk about exploding expectations of narrative, character, structure in a novel. It’s such a brilliant, strange novel.
—Nicole Krauss, The Guardian
