Sleep

Contemporary short stories about edgy, urban, obsessive characters by one of America’s best writers of experimental fiction.

This new volume presents short stories from the past twenty-five years by a master of contemporary fiction, collected in book form for the first time.

The edgy, obsessive characters in Sleep revise themselves as they speak, in sentences that cross themselves out and start over, as his narrators examine and explore every possible alternative, to the point where these texts become palimpsests, recording not only what is or was, but what might be. And it is left to the reader to determine which is which. Is which.

Publication date: April 1, 1999

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5

Page count: 288 pages

ISBN: 9781566890816

Stephen Dixon is a two-time finalist for the National Book Award, for Frog and Interstate, and the author of twenty books, including The Play and Other Stories and Sleep by Coffee House Press. His short works have previously appeared in many publications, including Harper’s, Triquarterly, and Best American Short Stories.

“Dixon’s quirky style almost renders ordinary exposition unnecessary. Instead, Dixon careens back and forth between machine-gun dialogue and description, merging thoughts, conversation, and other absurd narrative into a single mind blurring entity.”

—The Boston Globe

“A master at portraying the trajectory of a life. . . . He succeeds not only with his sharp ear for dialogue, but in the undermining of genre, often collapsing novel, short story, letter, and play elements into a cohesive whole.”

—Rain Taxi