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Rating: 
Summary: Evocative narrative that rewards patient concentration
Review: Elizabeth Hardwick's loosely autobiographical novel probably isn't for those who enjoy a plot-driven read, but once you get past the loose structure and itinerant moments, SLEEPLESS NIGHTS becomes something of a lush fever dream, where images and ideas come to the surface of the narrator's consciousness and are observed with keen detail before sinking again into darkness. The John Grishams and Stephen Kings of literature have taken us away from masters like Hardwick, who don't need to plot their novels like b-movies in order to entertain us. By the novel's end, you may not necessarily feel like you've traveled from point A to point B with a character, but Hardwick's trenchant commentaries on life, memory, and the things that pass between men and women still leave the reader with enough to ponder for many a sleepless night.
Rating: 
Summary: Simply incredible...
Review: I can really only reiterate what the last reviewer stated. This is one of the three or four books I pull off the bookshelf constantly to reread. Hardwick is a remarkable stylist and can evoke in a few pages (if not lines!) what it would take other writers whole novels to achieve. The section on Billie Holliday is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. This is the book that made me want to write.
Rating:
Summary: Simply incredible...
Review: I can really only reiterate what the last reviewer stated. This is one of the three or four books I pull off the bookshelf constantly to reread. Hardwick is a remarkable stylist and can evoke in a few pages (if not lines!) what it would take other writers whole novels to achieve. The section on Billie Holliday is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. This is the book that made me want to write.
Rating:
Summary: A gorgeously austere book about memory and loss
Review: On almost every page, a truth, poetry, carefully crafted prose: " The large, lonely house in the lovely, lonely northern town. The cold nights and the copper bottoms of the pans slowly losing their sheen. Nothing to smile about in the afternoons on the improvident sun porch. Bachelors again, in their depopulated settings,like large animals in their cages in the zoo, with the name of their species on the door." Plotless, apparently autobiographical, with telling observations on humanity encountered, I loved reading this exquisite work, inflamed as it is with the acknowledgement of what it is to be human.
Rating:
Summary: A gorgeously austere book about memory and loss
Review: Part fiction, part autobiography, part a collection of lovely pensees on literature and life, this exquisite short novel moves fluidly between the narrator's Kentucky past and her New York present, with stops along the way in Europe, Maine, Boston, and elswhere. Employing a spare, pared-down prose of great beauty and oringinality, Hardwick approaches her subject--memory and the transformations we work upon it, and it upon us--with great restraint, bringing the novel's people and places vividly to life with an odd, knotty phrase or unexpected choice of word. Rather than focus with gushing self-indulgence on her own experience in the manner of contemporary tell-all memoirs, the author is more often probing the lives of the ignored and downtrodden she has known--cleaning ladies and laborers, small-town prostitutes and impoverished radicals, failed writers and homeless piano teachers. Hardwick broods over these small, burdened, often overlooked lives with a wry, unsentimental tenderness and a gentle pessimism. I can't tell you how often I've picked up this book since I first read it just to savor a paragraph or two or its gorgeously austere prose.
Rating: 
Summary: Sooo Depressing
Review: This book draws characters that are right on the mark. However, I had a hard time geting into the book because I kept looking for a plot. After I realized there was not going to be any plot, I began to appreciated the character development in the various vignettes.On the whole, I prefer a book with some moments of humor, some suspense, or some inspiration. The book is unrelentingly morose.
Rating:
Summary: Evocative, beautiful, thin
Review: This small novella from NYRB is a much-lauded work by Elizabeth Hardwick from the mid-Seventies; essentially plotless, it's a work of memory (both Proust and Tenessee Williams seem to haunt these pages... as does, oddly, Djuna Barnes) that encompasses autobiographical material from Hardwick's life growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, at Columbia as a graduate student in NYC, and in Boston as the partner of Robert Lowell (though he is never named in the narrative). The prose is often gorgeous (although there are times when it does get a bit NEW YORKER-precious in its sensory observations); the narrative passes much like a very vivid dream or a hallucination, so that though there is little to follow it will stay with you for months afterwards. This new NYRB edition comes with a spectacularly beautiful cover that suggests the hyperreal quality of the narrative, and a vacuous preface that tells you almost nothing about the book .
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