A moving celebration of what Bill Hayes calls 'the evanescent, the eavesdropped, the unexpected' of life in New York City, and an intimate glimpse of his relationship with the late Oliver Sacks.
Bill Hayes is the author of The Anatomist, Five Quarts, and Sleep Demons. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction and was a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and his writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books and Salon, among other publications. His photographs have been featured in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. He lives in New York. billhayes.com
A loving tribute to Sacks and to New York ... Read just 50 pages,
and you’ll see easily enough how Hayes is Sacks’s logical
complement. Though possessed of different temperaments, both are
alive to difference, variety, the possibilities of our rangy
humanity; both are avid chroniclers of our species
*New York Times*
A beautiful memoir in which Oliver Sacks comes wonderfully to life
... Exquisitely wrought, heartrending and joyous
*Joyce Carol Oates*
Like New York, the city he celebrates so poignantly in this book,
Bill Hayes mixes 'memory with desire' to create a heartbreakingly
gorgeous story of love, loss, and renewal
*Azar Nafisi, author of READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN*
Remarkably poignant. Readers will find themselves wishing the two
men had more time, but as Hayes makes clear, they wasted none of
the time they had
*Publishers Weekly*
Written in heightened states of feeling that infuse every detail
with meaning and transient beauty
*Shelf Awareness*
A unique and exuberant celebration of life and love
*Kirkus Reviews*
Bill Hayes has an unusual set of skills ... He is part science
writer, part memoirist, part culture explainer
*The New York Times*
Like Patti Smith's haunting M Train, Hayes' book weaves seemingly
disparate threads of memory into a kind of sanctuary – a secret
place where one can shake off the treasured relics of past lives
and prepare to be reborn anew
*San Francisco Chronicle*
Hayes captures both the frenetic, exhilarating pace of New York
City as well as the whimsy, fun and romance of the years he spent
with Sacks
*New York Post*
Insomniac City is resoundingly about life – about being wide awake
to possibility, to the beauty of every fleeting moment.
*Oprah.com*
Buy a box of tissues and pray for snow: This is the perfect weekend
February read, and will have you alternately bawling and giddily
clapping your hands for the lovers that may not have had the time
they deserved, but certainly made the best with the time that they
had
*Newsweek, 'The Best New Book Releases'*
As eloquent in its silences and visuals as it is in its telling of
the secrets of the heart. . . . The brilliance of Insomniac City is
that almost Tolstoy-an directness and concretion of observation,
both down-to-earth and downright visionary
*Bay Area Reporter*
Poetic and profound ... What emerges from this dual love letter is
a lyrical reminder that happiness and heartache are inseparably
entwined ... Insomniac City is an ineffably splendid read in its
entirety, a mighty packet of pure aliveness.
*Brainpickings*
This beguiling brew of fascinating scientific facts and
illuminating, poignant anecdotes makes Five Quarts something like
blood itself: vital and pulsing with energy
*Entertainment Weekly*
That life permeates every page of Insomniac City, a dual love story
of a powerful relationship that will shortly end but, also, of a
city that is constantly reinventing itself
*Counterpunch*
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