Sleep Donation
At approximately 88,000 words, Sleep Donation is a haunting, slippery novella. Author of the acclaimed Swamplandia!, Karen Russell crafts a prose that is a blend of lush and unsettling, pulling readers into an America gripped by an insomnia epidemic. (I mean….more than it already is. Check out this book by Dr. Matthew Walker if you really wanna be freaked out and whipped into sleep-shape.) In this speculative reality, Slumber Corps harvests sleep from donors for transfusion. The narrator is Trish Edgewater, a recruiter whose grief pushes her mission further and further into a reality that is, for lack of better words, surreal. The premise is wild: sleep is a commodity. And Russell makes it hurt.