Dan Chaon
“All fiction is fan fiction, in a way—you fall in love with books when you’re a kid, and then you try to sing to those books so that they can hear you.”
Dan Chaon
(c) Géraldine Aresteanu
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“Chaon, the visionary author of Await Your Reply and Among the Missing, returns with another standout literary thriller...Sleepwalk is Chaon at the height of his powers.”
“This is his best one yet.”
“In his haunting, strikingly original new novel, [Dan] Chaon takes formidable risks, dismantling his timeline like a film editor and building the narrative with short, urgent chapters told from a few key perspectives. . . . As the story spins toward its inexorable conclusion, only the reader ascertains what is happening—a sinking realization that rattles the psyche and interferes with sleep. I read the concluding sections with increasing horror; the ending, twisting in the author’s assured hands like a Rubik’s Cube, is at once predictable and harrowing. Somehow, it resolved nothing and left me shaken. I believed this could happen—I believed all of it—and the only thing more terrifying than that is the possibility of another Dan Chaon novel. I will be nervously looking forward to it.”
“Eerily beautiful . . . [Chaon] is the modern day John Cheever.”
“Chaon deftly intertwines a trio of story lines, showcasing his characters’ individuality by threading subtle connections between and among them with effortless finesse, all the while invoking the complexities of what’s real and what’s fake with mesmerizing brilliance. This novel’s structure echoes that of his well-received debut–also a book of threes–even as it bests that book’s elegant prose, haunting plot and knockout literary excellence.”
“An important collection of stories, a genuinely literary accomplishment.”
Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of the bestselling novel Ill Will (Ballantine Books, 2017), named a best book of the year by The New York Times; the short story collection, Stay Awake (Ballantine Books, 2012), which The Washington Post called, “powerful and disturbing,” the novel Await Your Reply (Ballantine Books, 2009) called “stunning” by The New York Times; You Remind Me of Me (Ballantine Books, 2004) a novel which Elizabeth McCracken said is ”one of the strangest, most beautiful, most compelling books I’ve read in a long time;” the story collection Among the Missing (Ballantine Books, 2001) a finalist for the National Book Award; and the story collection Fitting Ends (Triquarterly, 1995). Chaon has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His next novel, Sleepwalk, will be published by Henry Holt & Co in April 2022.
In an interview in The Millions with former student Edan Lepucki, Chaon was asked about the role of class in his fiction: “Over the years, I’ve come to realize that social class is actually my big subject. It’s often a dirty word in political discussions, and easy to dismiss when compared to its companion, race. Generally, race is something that can’t be escaped or hidden; class, on the other hand, is a marker that’s far more nebulous, and part of the American delusion, for both the left and the right, is that it can be left behind, slipped out of like a suit of clothes.”
Chaon grew up in Sidney, Nebraska and lives in Cleveland Ohio. He taught at Oberlin College, where he was the Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing and Literature. He retired in 2018 to write full-time.
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Sleepwalk
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Ill Will
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Stay Awake
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Await Your Reply
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You Remind Me of Me
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Among the Missing
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Fitting Ends
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