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Staff Pick
This is a deeply unsettling novella that makes for particularly foreboding reading during our current pandemic. Sleep Donation was first published in 2014, but from the view point of 2020, it reads less like an imagined dystopia and more like a thinly veiled rebuke of late-stage capitalism, corruption, exploitation, and the federal pandemic response. Recommended By Emily B., Powells.com
In Sleep Donation, insomnia is a mysteriously contracted and potentially fatal condition. Trish works for an organization that has sprung up to help — encouraging people to donate their sleep and parceling it out to sleepless people in need. Ethical quandaries, scientific marvels, and a literal nightmare public relations disaster ensue. Karen Russell is a master of atmosphere: This book gave me goosebumps in a heatwave. It reminded me of the 3 a.m. energy of an all-nighter, and I couldn't put it down. Recommended By Michelle C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Trish Edgewater is the
Slumber Corps' top recruiter. On the phone, at a specially organized
Sleep Drive, even in a supermarket parking lot: Trish can get even the
most reluctant healthy dreamer to donate sleep to an insomniac in
crisis — one of hundreds of thousands of people who have totally lost the
ability to sleep. Trish cries, she shakes, she shows potential donors a
picture of her deceased sister, Dori: one of the first victims of the
lethal insomnia plague that has swept the globe.
Run by the wealthy and enigmatic Storch brothers, the Slumber
Corps is at the forefront of the fight against this deadly new disease.
But when Trish is confronted by "Baby A," the first universal sleep
donor, and the mysterious "Donor Y," whose horrific infectious
nightmares are threatening to sweep through the precious sleep supply,
her faith in the organization and in her own motives begins to falter.
Review
"Sleep Donation has a dreamlike beauty while remaining ominous and off-kilter. Parts of it gave
me nightmares — and I'm case-hardened."
Stephen King
Review
"An audaciously allegorical novella....As engaging as it is provocative." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"[Written] with
Twilight Zone-like inventiveness and the energy and brio of a
natural fantasist with a proclivity for blending the real and surreal,
the psychological and the sci-fi....[Russell] creates a fully
imagined world with its own rituals and rules, and deftly satirizes the
media and governmental responses to the plague of sleeplessness....Another testament to her fertile powers of invention." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
For the first time in paperback, a haunting novella from the uncannily imaginative author of the national bestsellers Swamplandia and Orange World the story of a deadly insomnia epidemic and the lengths one woman will go to to fight it. Trish Edgewater is the Slumber Corps' top recruiter. On the phone, at a specially organized Sleep Drive, even in a supermarket parking lot: Trish can get even the most reluctant healthy dreamer to donate sleep to an insomniac in crisis--one of hundreds of thousands of people who have totally lost the ability to sleep. Trish cries, she shakes, she shows potential donors a picture of her deceased sister, Dori: one of the first victims of the lethal insomnia plague that has swept the globe.
Run by the wealthy and enigmatic Storch brothers, the Slumber Corps is at the forefront of the fight against this deadly new disease. But when Trish is confronted by Baby A, the first universal sleep donor, and the mysterious Donor Y, whose horrific infectious nightmares are threatening to sweep through the precious sleep supply, her faith in the organization and in her own motives begins to falter.
Fully illustrated with dreamy evocations of Russell's singular imagination and featuring a brand-new Nightmare Appendix, Sleep Donation will keep readers up long into the night and long after haunt their dreams.
About the Author
Karen Russell has received a
MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, the "5 Under 35"
prize from the National Book Foundation, the New York Public Library
Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Berlin Prize from the American
Academy. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, son, and
daughter.