Stay Awake

Starred review from November 28, 2011
With this arresting collection, Chaon again demonstrates his mastery of the short story. In the hypnotic ”The Bees,” a young boy screams in his sleep for no reason; he’s suffered no known distress. He doesn’t even seem to be having nightmares. The boy’s father, greatly disturbed, soon finds his own dark past threatening to overwhelm his present. In the title story, Zach and Amber’s baby girl is born with an incompletely formed conjoined twin. When Zach narrowly survives death before a highly risky operation to separate the twins, this already fragile family is strained to the breaking point. An electrician named Critter, living with his young daughter in Toledo, Ohio, after the death of his wife, keeps found notes despite their troubling nature, in “To Psychic Underworld:.” Chaon’s protagonists are plagued by common traumas and struggle to rectify their decisions with the external forces of fate. More often than not, characters are stuck in an eddy that seems inescapable, yet which is also a moment’s isolation from the surrounding flow. Chaon (Await Your Reply) brings readers fantastically close, slowly drawing them into the anxiety or loneliness or remorse of his characters, and building great anticipation for the twists to come. Agent: Noah Lukeman, Lukeman Literary Management.

September 1, 2011

Distinctive, hurting, and brave, Chaon's characters suffer life's little jolts but scramble to get back on the path, their journey to self escalating to the tenth power as the prose flows. That's evident in his novels, like multiple best-book pick You Remind Me of Me, and even more evident in his short stories; they're often Pushcart, O. Henry, and Best American Short Stories honorees, and Among the Missing, his second collection, was a National Book Award finalist. Here's another collection featuring individuals in love or in mourning, always desperate to connect. Important whether or not you typically read short stories.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2012
Chaon's (Await Your Reply, 2009)newest enticing short story collection embraces unsettled moments in which lives shift and unfold. In To Psychic Underworld, Critter, a recently widowed husband left to raise his 1-year-old daughter, begins finding random handwritten notes on index cards, currency, inserts in magazines. As the notes appear more frequently, he is forced to come to terms with his wife's death as well as his place in the world. The haunting title story follows new parents Zach and Amy, whose daughter, Rosalie, is born with a parasitic twin. Tensions arise when Zach lands in the hospital after a near-fatal car accident and surgery to remove Rosalie's twin leads Zach into a cycle of doubts and what-ifs. Long Delayed, Always Expected finds 44-year-old January initiating a physical relationship with her brain-damaged ex-husband, Jeffrey, as a way to escape sullen thoughts about her life and the future. In The Bees, a son's sleep disorder becomes the catalyst for a father's reckoning of the past. Chaon's 12 tales deftly explore the reality and mystery of his characters' unmoored lives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)