About this Event
SLEEPWALK is a full-throttle road trip through America with a benevolent gun-for-hire, from one of our most beloved storytellers, Dan Chaon.
SLEEPWALK is told in the humorous voice of Will Bear—a low-level flunky for a clandestine criminal syndicate who has been floating through his life in cheerful chemical haze, “slightly empty, slightly lost, slightly delighted,” he says, traveling on assignment around the northern hemisphere in his trusty RV and with his faithful dog, living under assumed names and casually ignoring the collapsing world around him.
But when an insistent hacker claiming to be Will’s daughter phones on an unlisted number to inform him that he’s at the center of a global conspiracy, and that her life is in danger, the past he’s spent a lifetime trying to forget begins to catch up with him, and he finds himself doing the last thing he ever wanted to—getting involved.
A darkly comic shaggy chase novel full of suspense and adventure, SLEEPWALK evokes elements of Murakami and the Coen Brothers, Denis Johnson and Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, and the precarious potboilers of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe into a genre-bending page-turner all its own.
The program will be followed by book sales and signing. Books will be available for purchase thanks to BookPeople.
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ABOUT DAN CHAON: Dan Chaon is the author of six previous books, including Ill Will, a national bestseller, named one of the ten best books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly. Other works include the short story collection Stay Awake (2012), a finalist for the Story Prize; the national bestseller Await Your Reply; and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and the O. Henry Collection. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction and the Shirley Jackson Award, and he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Austin Central Library, Austin Public Library, 710 West Cesar Chavez Street, Austin, United States
USD 0.00