Stay awake : stories / Dan Chaon.

Includes a reader's guide.

The bees -- Patrick Lane, flabbergasted -- Stay awake -- Long delayed, always expected -- I wake up -- To Psychic Underworld -- St. Dismas -- Thinking of you in your time of sorrow -- Slowly we open our eyes -- Shepherdess -- Take this, Brother, may it serve you well -- The Farm, the gold, the lily-white hands.

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.

Dan Chaon’s stories feature scattered families, unfulfilled dreamers, anxious souls. They exist in a twilight realm—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.