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Elizabeth Hardwick
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Sleepless Nights (New York Review Books Classics) Kindle Edition

by Elizabeth Hardwick (Author), Geoffrey O'Brien (Introduction) Format: Kindle Edition
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 329 ratings
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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. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick’s finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.
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  1. Print length
    145 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    NYRB Classics
  5. Publication date
    July 13, 2011
  6. File size
    444 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“[T]he literary equivalent of polished onyx.”—James Clarke, The Guardian

"Brilliantly poised and confidently daring, Sleepless Nights is a chin-up tightrope walk along the borderline between fiction and autobiography . . . it is graceful, laconic, and wise." —Newsweek

"This original novel does everything for lost times that an irreplaceable family photograph album does—except that here, the words are worth a thousand pictures." —Philip Roth

"An extraordinary and haunting book." —Joan Didion, The New York Times Book Review

"Sleepless Nights—a novel of mental weather—enchants by the scrupulousness and zip of the narrative voice, its lithe, semi-staccato descriptions and epigrammatic dash." —Susan Sontag, The New Yorker

About the Author

ELIZABETH HARDWICK was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. A recipient of a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the author of Sleepless Nights and two other novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays, including Seduction and Betrayal, a study of women in literature that is also published by New York Review Books. Elizabeth Hardwick lives in New York City.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003WUYOQG
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ NYRB Classics; New Ed edition (July 13, 2011)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 13, 2011
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 444 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 145 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0940322722
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 329 ratings

About the author

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Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick

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Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
329 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Susan
5.0 out of 5 stars A Haunting Exploration of Love, Loss, and the Female Experience!
Reviewed in the United States on March 26, 2024
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Elizabeth Hardwick's 'Sleepless Nights' is a captivating collection of essays that delves into the complexities of love, loss, and the female experience. Through her introspective and evocative prose, Hardwick invites readers to confront their own emotions and ponder the profound questions of human existence.

**Love and Loneliness:**

Hardwick's essays explore the multifaceted nature of love. She unravels the ecstasy and agony of romantic relationships, the deep bonds of family, and the solitude that can accompany both. In 'The Sleeper,' she reflects on the ephemeral nature of desire and the heartbreak that can follow. In 'A View of the Ruins,' she dissects the decay of a marriage, revealing the emotional wreckage that remains.

**Loss and Mourning:**

'Sleepless Nights' also grapples with the inevitable pain of loss. Hardwick's essays are filled with poignant observations on grief and bereavement. In 'The Ghost,' she confronts the haunting memories of a deceased lover, while in 'Mourning,' she explores the universal experience of loss and the search for solace.

**The Female Experience:**

Hardwick's writing is deeply rooted in the female experience. She examines the social and cultural expectations that shape women's lives, as well as the challenges and triumphs they face. In 'The Woman on the Street,' she exposes the dangers and vulnerabilities that women encounter in public spaces. In 'The Writer as Woman,' she reflects on the struggles and rewards of being a female writer in a male-dominated world.

**Introspective and Poetic:**

Hardwick's prose is both introspective and poetic. She uses language with precision and beauty, creating vivid imagery and evocative metaphors. Her essays are not only intellectual explorations but also literary works of art. The reader is drawn into Hardwick's world, where emotions and ideas intertwine seamlessly.

**Conclusion:**

'Sleepless Nights' is a profound and moving collection of essays that will resonate with readers of all backgrounds. Hardwick's writing is honest, insightful, and deeply human. Through her exploration of love, loss, and the female experience, she invites us to confront our own emotions and ponder the complexities of human existence. This collection is a timeless masterpiece that deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone seeking literary depth and emotional resonance.
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Michael J. Ettner
4.0 out of 5 stars "Couples, looking into each other's eyes, as if they were safe"
Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2010
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Melancholy suffuses "Sleepless Nights." A collage of memories, ruminations, vignettes, and character sketches, its 150 pages encompass a lifetime of poignant observations by a first-rate writer.

The book is most powerful as a remembrance of persons, mostly women, now dead ("They are gone, with all their questions unanswered"). Hardwick recaptures the essence of their lives, examining without compromise "the niceness and the squalor and sorrow." Hardwick's prose is a wonder. She assembles telling details in the service of building a series of fateful narratives. She produces writing that is in the best sense "novelistic" -- even if the resulting book falls outside the category of a novel. The book is beyond category, and is no less rewarding for that fact.

Every few pages Hardwick recounts another love story she either participated in or was a wide-eyed witness to. She refers to them as "love affairs with energy and hope." Each affair begins well. For example, she describes a temporary roommate in her Manhattan apartment, a gay man who "was one of those who look into new eyes and say: Now I am going to be happy." Yet every affair turns tragic, in its own way. These stories are so fully (yet economically) modeled that you'll swear, by the close of the book, that you've read several novels. With Hardwick, the relationships of men and women, of both high and low station, almost always lead to bitter endings. Closest to home, a sad bitterness attaches to Hardwick's own reflections on men, from her earliest encounters (among the "couples, looking into each other's eyes, as if they were safe") to her caustic memory, at the book's end, of "a lifetime with its mound of men climbing on and off."

Hardwick always shows a remarkable empathy for the life journeys of others, especially for the deprived, those she finds "worn down by life." Of a janitor, Hardwick notes: "He was one of those men who acted as if he expected to be shouted at and would not know how to reply." Early in the book she profiles the doomed Billie Holiday, whom Hardwick knew in New York City in the 1940's and 1950's. The author re-envisions the jazz singer's life, starting with a quick sketch of her physicality ("the heavy laugh, marvelous teeth, and the splendid head, archaic, as if washed up from the Aegean"), moving on to her performances, then offering the lesson of her early death ("she shared the changeling's spectacular destiny and was acquainted with malevolent forces"). A later chapter of the book, Part Nine, stands apart as a remarkable essay about the cleaning women whose lives intersected with Hardwick, as she moved from homes in Maine, Boston, and New York City.

The scope of Hardwick's curiosity is wide-ranging, yet three of her interests struck me as noteworthy. One is her fascination, or more accurately her obsession, with people's teeth. She introduces new characters with minimal physical descriptions, yet she invariably notes the person's dental health, as if it were a critical component of moral character. Is this a bit of folk wisdom absorbed in her youth spent in the horse-breeding state of Kentucky? A notable item in her bag of writer's resources is her familiarity with farm animals and their behavior, which she freely applies to people. A Depression-era socialist organizer in rural Kentucky "had the look of a clever turkey." Two city street people, homeless women, "wander about in their dreadful freedom like old oxen left behind, totally unprovided for." A final attachment is Hardwick's love/hate relationship with New York City. Early in the book she argues for a clear linkage between person and place: "It is not true that it doesn't matter where you live." Her verdict on Gotham: "This is New York, with its graves next to its banks." And then there's this surprising statement: "A woman's city, New York."

I recommend "Sleepless Nights" to writers who want to write better. Hardwick belongs to the elite class of "writers' writer"; come and learn from her. I also recommend the book to anyone fascinated with Manhattan of the post-WWII era, and to anyone who wants to spend a few hours with a companionate teller of women's truths.

(Mike Ettner)
48 people found this helpful
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Abel De Los Santos
3.0 out of 5 stars Below Expectations
Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2016
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The prose used by Ms. Hardwick is superb, but is was difficult to engage in the book's imagery.
the book's flowing was contstant, there a lot of diversions that made it hard to follow the story in its entirety.
4 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Taha Javaid
5.0 out of 5 stars Full of insights
Reviewed in Canada on March 2, 2021
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Elizabeth Hardwick is a very underrated author. This book is short but rich with meaning. It’s as if she took the deepest insights from her life and wrote them down in the most concise manner. She is one of the rare breed of writers with the talent of being able to say the unsayable. And that also in a few words.
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Nikita Poddar
5.0 out of 5 stars Read for the gorgeous prose.
Reviewed in India on July 21, 2019
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These stories can be read in any order. My personal favourite would be the eighth chapter- the story of the odd Dutch couple will be haunting me for some time.
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Walter M. Holmes
4.0 out of 5 stars The Nature of Memory
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 17, 2013
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"The stranger, thin as the elegant crane outside the window, casts a shadow because she has arrived when I was thinking about the transformations of memory."
It is this pattern of thought that dominates this short novel. The writing, like the crane is elegant and precise. The memories may, or may not, reflect that which is recalled. The style dominates the substance and demands that this book is read at a pace that would confine most novels to oblivion. This is rumination on perception, its distortion, selectivity, and the nature of character, and of humanity. It is a constantly sad farewell to that which is bygone.
It could be thought of as a book for young people, but only because the old, such as myself, may find it rather hard to take. It cuts too deep with its effort to avoid the superficiality that many need just to get through the day!
Very easy to admire for the well-crafted prose and, as far as one can tell, the clarity of judgement, it remains one singular view of a specific past. This reader's empathy was not up to the task of consistent appreciation, perhaps because I know little of the author's life.
"American Fictions", a collection of Hardwick's thoughtful essays on many 20th Century novelists is excellent and enjoyable.
13 people found this helpful
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Emma Compton
4.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant writing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 23, 2013
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I would recommend this book to anyone who values the careful choice of words,. Hardwick is writing in the grief of being abandoned by the poet Robert Lowell. What she writes about is everything else in her life.
7 people found this helpful
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