Stay Awake Pdf Summary
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.
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Stay Awake Review
4.0 out of 5 stars Out of Reality, Into Pain
Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2012
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Dan Chaon’s new story collection, “Stay Awake,” offers readers a crisp, insightful world of characters facing difficult decisions. As these characters deal with these decisions, they often mask in resolving them by their past and present maladies, still lost in its void of turbulence.
For example, in the title story, “Stay Awake,” revolves around the main character, Zach, who deals with his twin babies with a rare genetic condition with fused heads, called craniopagus parasiticus. After Zach loses control of his car, nodding off, in a dream-like state of mind, he slams into a tree. The twins, in the car at the time, survive the crash, and Zach is in bad shape needing to be stabilized with a halo around his head to support his neck. As the story progresses, more dream-like moments of his past and present conflict with the harsh reality of taking care of the twins (or how his wife will be able to do it alone). I felt the story was really good, rendered in a way that puts the main character (Zach) in a position similar to what the twins must be experiencing: “A flicker of consciousness would wink on and off. Hello, a voice would say. I’m still here. I’m still with you … I’m still awake.”
In “Long Delayed, Always Expected,” a middle-age mother reminiscences about her college-age daughter and invites her ex-husband over for dinner, a man who had mild brain damage after a car accident. In her lonely and somewhat desperate attempt to keep occupied, she and her ex have a fling, and she starts to see her ex in a better way, thinking after his accident how he became more attractive, and even a better lover.
“He was a better lover, as a brain-damaged person, than he used to be–less self-conscious, less likely to come up with pronouncements like ‘I understand the importance of the clitoris,’ which he said to her once when they first began to sleep together and then he went down her politely for about eight minutes…”
Other stories by Chaon have similar themes: the quiet and desperate, lonely people of the world. People who use drugs, sex, and alcohol to blur out their problems. Chaon writes without sentimentality, but the reader is left only wanting to feel sorry for these people, even for those who seemingly have their life together. “Stay Awake” is a must read collection of stories, mainly because it describes many of us who deal with real-life issues in a less provocative manner of telling, but chilling, often very mesmerizing way when we arrive at the end of each story. Great read!
4.0 out of 5 stars Trauma makes for good stories…
Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2012
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I was first introduced to Dan Chaon when I started getting interested in short stories in the late 1990s. I remember being blown away by several of his stories, and over the years I eagerly devoured both of his novels, You Remind Me of Me and Await Your Reply, which was one of my favorite books I read in 2009. Stay Awake is Chaon’s return to short stories, and while I didn’t feel that any of the stories in this collection packed the power of some of his older stories, they are still tremendously well-written and immensely readable.
All of the characters in these stories are dealing with some sort of trauma, be it physical, psychological, even paranormal. Some of my favorite stories included “To Psychic Underworld:,” in which a young widower starts finding cryptic notes on dollar bills, restaurant napkins, tacked to trees, etc.; “Thinking of You in Your Time of Sorrow,” which follows a high school couple whose lives are thrown into turmoil when their baby dies; “Long Delayed, Always Expected,” in which a woman has an interesting way of dealing with empty nest syndrome; and “I Wake Up,” which follows a young man who receives an out-of-the-blue phone call from his oldest sister, years after their family has been split into separate foster homes following their mother’s horrible crime. Some of the stories work better than others; I tended to enjoy those that dealt with more regular situations than those which focused on the odd or paranormal.
Dan Chaon is a terrific writer, and his storytelling ability definitely shines in many of the stories in this collection. I guess it’s my own fault for expecting a story or two to really wallop me, based on his previous collections, but this is an enjoyable and compelling collection worthy of a read.
About Dan Chaon Author Of Stay Awake pdf Book
Dan Chaon is the Author Of Stay Awake pdf Book, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing. His new novel, Await Your Reply, will be published in late August 2009.
Stay Awake pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- Publisher : Ballantine Books; 1st edition (February 7, 2012)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0345530373
- ISBN-13 : 978-0345530370
- Item Weight : 15.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.77 x 0.98 x 8.56 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #777,590 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,178 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #12,499 in Short Stories (Books)
- #35,771 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews: 4.1 out of 5 stars 113 ratings
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