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Karen Russell

Sleep Donation (Vintage Contemporaries) Paperback – Illustrated, September 29, 2020

by Karen Russell (Author)

3.6 1,190 ratings

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ONE OF BUZZFEED'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

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.

Print length

176 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

September 29, 2020
Dimensions

5.17 x 0.51 x 7.99 inches
ISBN-10

0525566082
ISBN-13

978-0525566083
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Editorial Reviews

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

"[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

"A starkly dystopian novella reminiscent of George Saunders in its bleak humor, the directness of its prose." —Los Angeles Times

“Russell wrote Sleep Donation over half a decade ago, yet her nightmarish vision of a nation keelhauled by an insomnia epidemic now registers as shockingly prescient. . . . [Russell has] the finest imagination in contemporary fiction. Sleep Donation is Russell at the height of her formidable powers, at once an eerie evocation of a country whose sins have come home to roost, as well as a deeply personal story of grief and terror.” —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

"Russell's gift is to provide deep immersion in the details, and in Trish's haunting, urgent emotions. . . . Russell offsets . . . expertly induced unease with humour and wry social commentary." —The Guardian

"Wonderful. . . . Like George Saunders, Russell writes with a Swiftian sense of satire. . . . Russell has a keen sense of dramatic timing and an even sharper ability to turn an internal state into its own weather system." —The Boston Globe

“A tense but captivating read, eerie in its prescience. . . . [A] philosophical meditation on dreams and consciousness, and a moving examination of love and empathy.” —BuzzFeed

"The combination of Russell's dazzling imagination and virtuosic prose adds up to pleasurable sensory overload." —Entertainment Weekly

"Russell handles the extraordinary in a humorous manner. . . . Sleep Donation's magical realism flare makes it not your average dystopia." —GQ

“A tense but captivating read, eerie in its prescience. . . . [A] philosophical meditation on dreams and consciousness, and a moving examination of love and empathy.” —BuzzFeed

"Russell specializes in creating fantastical worlds that hum with recognizable rhythms. She excels at marrying the commonplace with the extraordinary." —Miami Herald

"Signature Russell: a fanciful, droll, elaborately thought-through allegory with a dark center. . . . Russell's language . . . is acrid, luminous, and deft. . . . She will chase down every flicker of ordinary experience and return with descriptions of uncanny aptness. . . . Her sentences both resonate with familiarity and startle with beauty." —Slate

"Weird, hilarious, and brilliant." —The Millions

"An audaciously allegorical novella. . . . As engaging as it is provocative." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Illustrated edition (September 29, 2020)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 176 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0525566082
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0525566083
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.17 x 0.51 x 7.99 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #936,721 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #768 in Humorous Science Fiction (Books)
- #1,548 in Metaphysical & Visionary Fiction (Books)
- #44,305 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3.6 1,190 ratings

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Karen Russell

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Karen Russell is the New York Times bestselling author of Swamplandia!, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the novella Sleep Donation, and the short story collections Orange World and Other Stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, and St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim and a MacArthur Fellowship. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon.

Photo © Dan Hawk

Customer reviews

3.6 out of 5

1,190 global ratings

5 star		25%
4 star		32%
3 star		25%
2 star		12%
1 star		6%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Guitarman

overall, I liked it.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 14, 2023

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Overall, I liked this book. I liked the blend of literary fiction with speculative fiction. I think that the ending should have been different though.

Helpful

Rae A. Francoeur

Karen Russell makes a familiar world more dire

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 19, 2014

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In Karen Russell’s strange, numbed world, an epidemic of fatal sleeplessness afflicts the United States. The cause is unknown but there is a cure.

“Sleep Donation,” a novella available as either an e-book or audio book, is itself like an altered state in which everything is familiar but off. This epidemic of sleeplessness occurs in what feels like a current day setting that has necessarily evolved to accommodate the burgeoning disaster.

Trish Edgewater, the story’s narrator, is a recruiter for Slumber Corps, a small nonprofit run by two wealthy brothers who’ve committed their lives to administering the cure to the sleepless and dying. The cure is some part of healthy sleep that is collected from healthy sleeping people — sleep donors — and transfused into the sleepless. There are almost no side effects and once you get the correct transfusion, you are permanently cured.

Slumber Corps solicits donations and Trish is especially persuasive. Her sister Dori was the first on the East Coast to die of sleeplessness. Trish, who the brothers call a “grief hemophiliac” for how effectively she can recall the horrific circumstances of Dori’s decline and death, recruits thousands of donors. She’s one of the best. These donations are forwarded to a few central locations where they are analyzed for contaminants and synthesized. Nightmares contaminate and, therefore, people are screened carefully before they are allowed to donate their sleep. One donor, Baby A, is a universal donor. Her sleep is “black” — deep, pure and works for anyone. Baby A is one of Trish’s recruits and it’s Baby A’s situation that gives this story its edge. The brothers want as much of Baby’s A’s sleep as Trish can persuade the family to donate, despite a resistant father and the fact that donating too much sleep can permanently, if not fatally, damage the donor.

Readers will sense the precarious balance in this world of non-sleep-walkers. It’s not a centralized government that commits to providing the cure, but individual concerns like that of the seemingly altruistic Storch brothers and their band of tireless (it’s not a pun) volunteers. The balance is blown when Donor Y’s sleep, fatally contaminated with nightmares, enters the national repository. Eventually the epidemic spreads to the rest of the world, along with Donor Y’s contaminated sleep.

Among the themes are a few that are especially familiar here in the United States. When Baby A’s sleep is hotly pursued, Trish says, “We have never in our species’ history respected Nature’s limits.” When she views the astonishing Night World, with its seductive potions and Poppy Fields that purport to offer sleep to the sleepless, she says, America’s greatest talent is its ability to generate desire that would never occur natively.

Trish also discovers that Donor Y may not have been a sleep terrorist after all, someone who knowingly tried to contamination the nation’s well of healthy donated sleep. He may have been a “good soul” who simply was “as clueless as the rest of us about his mind’s contents.”

Russell’s writing is remarkably concise and yet dreamy all at once. She describes in beautiful but controlled detail this other world we know and yet don’t know. It is a feat in itself to give us this world in 110 pages, complete with the tool that Trish will use to destroy the fragile construct one ailing society clings to.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Lois Barliant

Beauty Staging its Coup in Every Sentence and Scene in Sleep Donation

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 8, 2015

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Pretend you‘re sleep deprived. You’ve tossed, you’ve turned, you’ve tossed again. 300 times on each side. Do NOT pick up Karen Russell’s Sleep Donation. It won’t get you to sleep. There’s nothing soporific about it. On the other hand, you will lie awake remembering incredible scenes like “You’d think it would be difficult to hide in a trailer. But I’m chameleoned next to the phone wall, near the black window. Some intern has made curtains for the trailer windows, snaggy lacy, which look nothing like curtains, in fact, but vestment tiny and obscene: bridal veils for mice, chinchilla negligees. They flutter in the trailer’s manic air-conditioning. Outside, the moon is a colossus. Its radiance makes every white of human seem dingy, impure.”
“Nobody wants to … admit the insomnia emergency is now a permanent condition.” By the end of that description of the curtains some intern put up to cover-up the bleak reality is a chilling portent of the depravity of convincing parents to donate the pure sleep of their soundly sleeping babies to those whose lives are tortured by whatever self-doubt or guilt keeps them awake. By the end of Sleep Donation, you will have seen as many kinds of white occurring in nature and of “human manufacture” as there are words for snow in the Artic.
In Sleep Donation, you will meet executives as depraved as any politically-connected capitalist, a horrifying infestation to rival Ebola, and the manipulation of human decency for financial gain to highlight a few of the quirks of our society Russell presents as her protagonist Trish Edgewater grapples with her responsibility to her sister’s story, the parents of Baby A, and to society.
Trish sleeps at night believing the numbers: 18 Insomniacs will dream tonight because of a sleep donor’s generosity, less than 1% of the donors experience any adverse reactions, the Slumber Corps has helped over 3,000 insomniacs, 250,000 people are on the wait-list nationwide, and, her favorite: 34% of Insomniacs Will Regain Their Natural Ability to Sleep After a SINGLE TRANSFUSION. Can’t you see the flyer sent to every potential donor?
While it’s true that the narrative of Sleep Donation keeps you turning pages, there’s also the joy of coming to descriptions like “Several bikes knock around on their chains, an eerily genial sound, as if the machines are gossiping. Early spring, and this whole block smells like flowers. The heaving blossoms turn out to be everywhere once you notice them, overflowing the rain gutters and the sills of second-story windows, unencouraged, unsupported, and nevertheless here once more, vivid white in the night air. Beauty staging its coup in every suburb and slum in the galaxy. You’re lucky to be alive to see it, aren’t you, Edgewater?”
It’s hard to stop with one. Here’s another when Russell carries the physical truth to a deeper insight about humanity: “And goodness knows, I have worked with many people in this waking life who seem congenitally incapable of accepting any human donation of blood, marrow, sleep, criticism, praise, money, love.”
And one of those apt insights of what conveys a reality: “’It’s not fair,’ agrees Dr. Glasheen, with the worn-smooth voice of someone whose expectations have all been filed away by the nightly emery of his hospital duties.”
Sleep Donation offers a glimpse of our waking reality, the nightmare of exploitation, and the generosity of selfless contribution.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Amazon Customer

A waste of a couple of hours

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 7, 2020

Verified Purchase

Potentially there is an average short story hiding in here but Russell pads it out to an unengaging 140 pages. The problem is the writing, and that's a big problem. The dialogue is painful and lacks any sense of how people speak - ok its science fiction set in a challenging new world, but come on. But its the florid, lengthy and pretentious descriptive passages that grate the most. Never one to let one word suffice, Russell drags her sentences out beyond what is necessary or wise. I couldn't give a toss about the heroine, the experimental subjects or anyone else by about page 20.
Pretentious? How about a 10 word chapter. Or two? Maybe three?
What is the point of the very poor illustrations? Or the "manual" at the end?
The icing on the cake is the worst sex scene I've ever read, amazing given that it clocks in at about 100 words.
Read a paper instead.

Andrew G. Matthews

Edible Prose

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 18, 2016

Verified Purchase

In her previous work, Karen Russell has shown that she has a startlingly unconventional and original imagination; this book is no exception. The storyline is, ironically, dreamlike and compelling. Most strikingly, Karen Russell uses words like no one else. I found myself rereading sentences for the pure pleasure of it. Her prose is almost edible. If you want to be startled, provoked and transported, don't hesitate to buy this book.

katiestabler

Interesting until it stopped being so

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 28, 2016

Verified Purchase

I liked the idea that insomnia is the worlds new major ailment, it's timely.

I liked the characters build up although they took my a while to visualize.

I was very disappointed with the ending, it left me feeling underwhelmed and like I'd wasted my time

julia smith

Good easy read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 7, 2017

Verified Purchase

I enjoyed the book and found it really easy to read. The story was inventive and interesting. I would recommend it if you want a quick read that makes you think.

Amazon Customer

Quirky short story.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 28, 2016

Verified Purchase

Some interesting ideas, but the short length meant a lot went unanswered at the end.
I would still suggest that others read it though.

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Sleep Donation (Vintage Contemporaries) Paperback – Illustrated, September 29, 2020

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