(Ebook) Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, Eimear McBride (introduction) ISBN 9780571347322, 0571347320

(Ebook) Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, Eimear McBride (introduction) ISBN 9780571347322, 0571347320

I am alone here in New York, no longer a we ...

First published in 1979, Sleepless Nights is a unique collage of fiction & memoir, letters & essays, portraits & 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 & alcohol & clothes on the floor.' 

Here begin the erotic affairs & dinner parties, the abortions & heartbreaks, the friendships & 'people I have buried'. Here are luminous sketches of characters she has met that illuminate the era's racism, sexism, & 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.

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“Extraordinary & haunting.” — Joan Didion 

“This novella was Hardwick’s third & was published when the author was 63. It’s nontraditional in that it jumps around from fragment to fragment, touching on this or that, & coalescing into a story rather than plodding linearly toward one—much like the mind revisiting a life during, yes, a sleepless night.” — Kenzie Bryant, Vanity Fair