Sleepless Nights
First edition (US)
AuthorElizabeth Hardwick
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreLiterary fiction
PublisherRandom House (US)
Weidenfeld and Nicolson (UK)
Publication date
1979

Sleepless Nights is a 1979 novel by American novelist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick.[1]

Summary

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. The novel contains autobiographical elements including glimpses into her childhood in Kentucky, visiting jazz clubs to see Billie Holiday, trysts with American Communists, poets, and New York's literary intelligentsia .[2]

Hardwick dedicated the novel to her daughter, Harriet, and to Mary McCarthy. As told by writer Sarah Nicole Prickett: "Hardwick began the novel after divorcing her husband [the American poet Robert Lowell] and finished it after he died in a taxi from the airport to her apartment." The book was influenced by both Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Colette’s The Pure and the Impure.[3]

Reception

Writing for the New York Times, Lauren Groff referred to the book as "[...] brilliant, brittle and strange".[4]

Cultural influence

Sigrid Nunez drew inspiration from the book while writing her novel The Friend.[5]

References

  1. ↑ O'Brien, Geoffrey (20 September 2001). "On 'Sleepless Nights'". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 24 July 2019.
  2. ↑ McBride, Eimear (29 June 2019). "Novel, letter, essay, memoir? Eimear McBride on Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 July 2019.
  3. ↑ "A View of Her Own". www.bookforum.com. Retrieved 2023-08-17.
  4. ↑ Groff, Lauren (26 July 2019). "In Praise of Elizabeth Hardwick". The New York Times. Retrieved 24 July 2019.
  5. ↑ Zaleska, Monika (23 February 2018). "You Can't Explain Death to An Animal: An Interview with Sigrid Nunez". Literary Hub. Retrieved 20 January 2021.
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