Sleep Donation: A Novella

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Atavist Incorporated, Mar 25, 2014 - Fiction - 110 pages

 From the author of the New York Times bestseller Swamplandia!, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, an imaginative and haunting novella about an insomnia epidemic set in the near future.

A crisis has swept America. Hundreds of thousands have lost the ability to sleep. Enter the Slumber Corps, an organization that urges healthy dreamers to donate sleep to an insomniac. Under the wealthy and enigmatic Storch brothers the Corps’ reach has grown, with outposts in every major US city. Trish Edgewater, whose sister Dori was one of the first victims of the lethal insomnia, has spent the past seven years recruiting for the Corps. But Trish’s faith in the organization and in her own motives begins to falter when she is confronted by “Baby A,” the first universal sleep donor, and the mysterious “Donor Y.”

Sleep Donation explores a world facing the end of sleep as we know it, where “Night Worlds” offer black market remedies to the desperate and sleep deprived, and where even the act of making a gift is not as simple as it appears.

About the author (2014)

 Karen Russell is the author of Swamplandia!, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and two collections of short stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, a New York Times bestseller, and St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. She is the recipient of a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, and she was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40,” The National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35,” and Granta’s “Best of Young American Novelists.” She lives in New York City.

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