RaveThe Masters ReviewAt the end of Russell’s short stories I often find myself craving a few (or, a hundred) more pages. The novella is a fitting form for her imagination. Though, honestly, I still wanted Sleep Donation to be even longer (at the end, I thought: and then what happened?). This is as much a testament to the complete and compelling world created here as anything ... As Russell’s early story laments, we may be alone in our dreams, but as Sleep Donation shows us, we are useless without them.
Karen Russell
PositiveMaster\'s ReviewEven though Sleep Donation takes place in its own sleep-deprived reality, it’s an eerily familiar tale. After all, we readers live in a world in which there are cures for insomnia, but in which there are no clear answers to the novella’s central questions: How much of ourselves should we share with others? In the first place, how much should we be asked to give? At the end of Russell’s short stories I often find myself craving a few (or, a hundred) more pages. The novella is a fitting form for her imagination. Though, honestly, I still wanted Sleep Donation to be even longer (at the end, I thought: and then what happened?). This is as much a testament to the complete and compelling world created here as anything ... Sleep Donation is also an interesting study of how Russell’s own authorial preoccupations have evolved ... In Sleep Donation , we see how necessary this \'occipital sorrow\' is; we need it to help us digest reality, to carve out our own unique place within it. In the advanced stages of insomnia, its sufferers become psychotic; their ability to perceive reality is gone. Sufferers hallucinate. In the end, their organs fail. They have heart attacks or strokes. But, before that, they have lost their ability to separate one moment from the next, to make sense of their own identities.
Amber Sparks
RaveThe RumpusThis latest collection establishes Sparks as a master wordsmith, a crafter of small literary wonders ... While the bizarre objects in her stories may (for the most part) not exist in this world, Sparks offers us, with her latest collection, her own trove of carefully wrought wonders.
