Buying Options

Kindle Price:	$9.99
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services Price set by seller.

Promotions apply when you purchase

Add Audible narration to your purchase for just $7.49

Deliver to your Kindle or other device

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

Enter a promotion code or Gift Card

Share <Embed>

Sleepless Nights (New York Review Books Classics) by [Elizabeth Hardwick, Geoffrey O'Brien]

Follow the Author

Elizabeth Hardwick

Sleepless Nights (New York Review Books Classics) Kindle Edition

by Elizabeth Hardwick (Author), Geoffrey O'Brien (Introduction) Format: Kindle Edition

147 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$9.99

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$7.17

$58.35

$3.18

Paperback

"Please retry"

$13.99

$8.99

$4.03

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.

Print length

145 pages
Language

English
Publisher

NYRB Classics
Publication date

July 13, 2011
File size

444 KB
Page Flip

Enabled
Word Wise

Enabled
Enhanced typesetting

Enabled
See all details

Elizabeth Hardwick
40
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $15.99
Elizabeth Hardwick
27
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $9.99
Cathy Curtis
21
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $16.05
Elizabeth Hardwick
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $11.99
Elizabeth Hardwick
19
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $11.99
Beryl Markham
2,785
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $8.50

Create your FREE Amazon Business account to save up to 10% with Business-only prices and free shipping. Register today

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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
Print length ‏ : ‎ 145 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0940322722
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #157,048 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #206 in Biographical Literary Fiction
- #353 in Literary Satire Fiction
- #384 in Biographical Fiction (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
147 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

5 star		52%
4 star		18%
3 star		19%
2 star		3%
1 star		7%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

wonderful writing, reflective story

Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2021

Verified Purchase

My first book of 2021, just 128 pages, was not the kind of story I'm normally drawn to, but it was one that I enjoyed reading. It was written by the author when she was 63 years old and is partially autobiographical.

Intro paragraph --"It is JUNE. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one that I am leading today. Every morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread with its pink and blue and gray squares and diamonds. How nice it is--this production of a broken old woman in a squalid nursing home. The niceness and the squalor and sorrow in an apathetic battle--that is what I see. More beautiful is the table with the telephone, the books and magazines, the Times at the door, the birdsong of rough, grinding trucks in the street."

From her Kentucky childhood, one of nine children to grad school at Columbia in NY we get a feel for the old smoky jazz clubs of NY and long gone hotels of years passed. Traveling to her large summer home in Maine and to stays in Boston, Vermont, Connecticut and Europe we follow her life, her friends, her experiences in an unsentimental sort of way.

The story is very visual, the writing excellent, it almost had a dreamlike quality at times. Although the writing style was a bit unconventional, it felt all the more personal to me, like I was an old friend that she was reliving her past experiences with. I'm happy I started the New Years with this book from my shelves. -- quite, reflective, memorable.

4.5/5 stars

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Michael J. Ettner

"Couples, looking into each other's eyes, as if they were safe"

Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2010

Verified Purchase

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)

39 people found this helpful

Helpful

Nancy TalbotTop Contributor: Pets

Impeccable Writer

Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2018

Verified Purchase

Hardwick is a writer's writer as well as a well read reader's writer. Her use of language is absolutely masterful and delightful . She has an exceptional ability to see clearly the very inner workings of people, the things they might rather keep hidden. At the same time, the reader gets the sense that they are seeing into Hardwick herself

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Steven R. Wallace

A worthy memoir in the form of a novel

Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2020

Verified Purchase

Wonderfully well-written reminiscences that come across more as a memoir than a novel. But then, memory is always infected with fiction. Her riffs on Billie Holliday alone make the read worthwhile.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

T. M. Teale

Hardwick, a master of craft and content

Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2005

Verified Purchase

Heads up, all of you with M.F.A.s and those aspiring to write narrative non-fiction and autobiography. Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights is a masterpiece of the genre avant la lettre. Through an effective use of sentence fragments, notes and letters sent and received, and sketches of people she has known intimately, Hardwick gives the reader a solid picture of New York City in the 1940s and after. But what Hardwick teaches us is that if writing can be taught, it must first be lived. Underneath Hardwick's combination of intimate conversational style and terse analysis of a lost era, one feels the author is a person of stable character, one who is a fully-conscious human being. Stylistically, Hardwick's method of composition is a pastiche of styles, a Post-modern hybrid, grounded in the fierce Modernist belief that every human being is essential to life.

Hardwick conveys human individuality through the technique of synaesthesia, a breathless juxtaposition of noun and adjective; for example, a young man was "a living, sturdy weed of gossip and laughter, of racing confessions about nights of fun and errors, of cooking recipes with unexpected olives, of fish sprinkled with chocolate..." Hardwick excites our desire to know the people she has known. I am a better human being for having read this book.

20 people found this helpful

Helpful

Amazon Customer

Simply boring

Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2020

Verified Purchase

This is one of the most boring books I have ever read. I finished it only out of respect for the author, but it was pure torture.

Helpful

Amazon Customer

Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2022

Verified Purchase

I know she a literary star but it’s not my cup of tea. The story of her clips from life were not grabbing. If you are interested in personality studies this could be for you.

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Walter M. Holmes

The Nature of Memory

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 17, 2013

Verified Purchase

"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

Emma Compton

Brilliant writing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 23, 2013

Verified Purchase

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

Taha Javaid

Full of insights

Reviewed in Canada on March 2, 2021

Verified Purchase

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.

One person found this helpful

Nikita Poddar

Read for the gorgeous prose.

Reviewed in India on July 21, 2019

Verified Purchase

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.

See all reviews