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Insomnia

Insomnia

by Marina Benjamin (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2018

    $3.28
Synopsis

An intense, lyrical, witty, and humane exploration of a state we too often consider only superficially.

With her new memoir Insomnia, Marina Benjamin has produced an unsettling account of an unsettling condition that treats our inability to sleep not as a disorder, but as an existential experience that can electrify our understanding of ourselves, and of creativity and love.

Insomnia is a bravura piece of writing. At once philosophical and poetical, the book ranges widely over history and culture, literature and art, exploring a threshold experience that is intimately involved with trespass and contamination: the illicit importing of day into night. With Insomnia, Benjamin aims to light up the workings of our inner minds, delivering a startlingly fresh look at what it means to be wakeful in the dark.

$3.28

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1 in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 144
 Publisher: Scribe UK
Published: 01 Nov 2018
ISBN 10: 1911344927
ISBN 13: 9781911344926

Media Reviews

`A sublime view of the treasures and torments to be found in wakefulness. Entertaining and existential, the brightest star in this erudite, nocturnal reverie in search of lost sleep, is the beauty of the writing itself.'

-- Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk

'Every insomniac knows how sleeplessness warps and deforms reality. Marina Benjamin anatomises its endless nights and red-eyed mornings, finding a sublime language for this strange state of lack. Her writing is often reminiscent of Anne Carson: beautiful, jagged and precise.'

-- Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City

'An exquisite meditation on time, the dark hours, and the complexities of longtime love, Insomnia is a poetic journey into the wide-awake, generous, exciting mind of Marina Benjamin. I couldn't put it down, and my own inner world is richer for it.'

-- Dani Shapiro, author of Hourglass

`Marina Benjamin is the Scheherazade of sleeplessness, spinning tale upon tale, insight upon insight, in frayed and astonishing and finally ecstatic loops.'

-- Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill

`Insomnia reads with the surreal and suspended cadence of those lonely hours in the night that only the sleep-less experience. It is, therefore, a kind and intimate companion to our meandering, agitated, non-knowing, spiritually naked thoughts at such hours. Keep it by your bedside lamp!'

-- Sarah Wilson, author of First, We Make the Beast Beautiful

`Benjamin writes beautifully. This is a graceful rumination on the `wicked kind of trespass' that is insomnia, a work cogent and allusive as a lucid dream, a palimpsest of insights to dip into, day or night.'

-- Anna Funder author of Stasiland and All That I Am

`Clever, wise and witty - and ever so slightly cosmic too. This is for us who know what it is to be forlorn at 3am ...'

-- Shahidha Bari

`A wonderful, sometimes painful compendium of thoughts about sleeplessness and its meanings. I recognised its nocturnal terrain.'

-- Gerard Woodward

`Will nurture you at any wakeful hour.'

-- Joanne Limburg

`A beautiful book to keep you awake.'

-- Philip Hoare
Author Bio
Marina Benjamin is a writer and editor. Her most recent books are The Middlepause, Rocket Dreams, shortlisted for the Eugene Emme Award, and Last Days in Babylon, longlisted for the Wingate Prize. As a journalist, she's written for most of the British broadsheets and served as arts editor at the New Statesman and deputy arts editor at the Evening Standard. She is currently a senior editor at the digital magazine Aeon.