Sally Rooney: ‚A series of fleeting images and memories … united by the high intelligence and beauty of Hardwick’s prose.‘ Rediscover a lost American classic: Sleepless Nights, a kaleidoscopic scrapbook of one woman’s memories, here reissued with a new introduction by Eimear McBride. I am alone here in New York, no longer a we … First published in 1979 , Sleepless Nights is a unique collage of fiction and memoir, letters and essays, portraits and dreams. It is more than the story of a life: it is Elizabeth Hardwick’s experience of womanhood in the twentieth century. Escaping her childhood home of Kentucky, the narrator arrives at a bohemian hotel in Manhattan filled with ‚drunks, actors, gamblers … love and alcohol and clothes on the floor.‘ Here begin the erotic affairs and dinner parties, the abortions and heartbreaks, the friendships and ‚people I have buried‘. Here are luminous sketches of characters she has met that illuminate the era’s racism, sexism, and poverty. Above all, here is prose blurring into poetry, language to lose – and perhaps to find – yourself in. Society tries to write these lives before they are lived. It does not always succeed.
ISBN: 978-0-571-34699-8
