Stay Awake: Stories

Dan Chaon

Feb 2012 · Dreamscape Media · Narrated by Kirby Heyborne

About this audiobook

In these haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss, grief or loneliness, displacement or disconnection - and find themselves in unexpected, dire, and sometimes unfathomable situations.

A father's life is upended by his son's night terrors - and disturbing memories of the first wife and child he abandoned; a foster child receives a call from the past and begins to remember his birth mother; a divorced woman experiences her own dark version of 'empty-nest syndrome.'

They exist in a place by the window late at night when the streets are empty and the world appears to be quiet. But you are up, unable to sleep. So you stay awake.

©2012 Dan Chaon (P)2012 Dreamscape Media, LLC

About the author

Dan Chaon is an author born and raised in Nebraska. He is a novelist who wrote "Among the Missing" which was a 2001 finalist for the National Book Award and named one of the year's ten best books by the American Library Association. His short stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthologies and The O. Henry Prize Stories. His 2017 novel "Ill Will" was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. It was also nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award and International Thriller Writers Award. Chaon began his career as a professor at Oberlin College where he was the Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing. He retired in 2018 to fcous full-time on his writng. His third short story collection, Stay Awake, was a finalist for The Story Prize.