Showing results for "sleep" in Coming of Age

‘Do yourself a favour and read this wonderful book’ Scotsman Based on the true story of conjoined Russian twins, Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova, The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep is a tale of survival and self-determination, innocence and lies. No one expects Dasha and Masha to live...

When six-year-old Dolores Hummingbird arrives at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, she has a difficult time adjusting. She has never before spent one night away from her parents. Renamed “Cries in her Sleep” by the girls in her dorm, Dolores eventually finds companionship and love in the person of an orphaned Irish girl called “Sky Eyes.” Both girls are exemplary artist. After graduation, they live and paint in Greenwich Village and receive instruction from Robert Henri of the Ashcan School. But Paris is calling them from across the ocean.

A sensitive boy growing up in a bad neighborhood, Harry Riddle doesn’t fit in with the kids who hold up gas stations, steal purses, and drop safes on policemen. He prefers to contemplate the American dream and his father’s advice for achieving it: “Get rich, boy. Then sleep till noon and screw ’em all.” But when Harry gets his first job as a cafeteria busboy, a customer warns him that money leads to corruption. The idea disturbs him so much that he accidentally sticks his hand into a meat grinder.

From James Leo Herlihy (author of Midnight Cowboy) comes a series of grim yet insightful short stories in his first collection, The Sleep of Baby Filbertson. Both an examination of the darker themes of alienation and isolation and an elevation of the oddities and quirks that make up human nature, Herlihy’s seven tales tackle the anxieties of fragile people and get to the heart of a world inhabited by perennial outsiders.

The year is 1964. The Hillsingers and the Quicks have shared the small Maine island of Seven for generations. But though technically family - Jim Hillsinger and Billy Quick married Park Avenue sisters Lila and Hannah Blackwell - they do not mix. Now, on the anniversary of Hannah's death, Lila feels grief pulling her toward Billy. And Jim, a spy recently ousted from the CIA on suspicion of treason, decides to carry out the threat his wife has explicitly forbidden: to banish their youngest son, the 12-year-old Catta, to the neighboring island of Baffin for 24 hours.