" Sleep Donation has a dreamlike beauty while remaining ominous and off-kilter. Parts of it gave me nightmares--and I'm case-hardened." --Stephen King "[Written] with Twilight Zone -like inventiveness and the energy and brio of a natural fantasist with a proclivity for blending the real and surreal, the psychological and the sci-fi. [Russell] creates a fully imagined world with its own rituals and rules, and deftly satirizes the media and governmental responses to the plague of sleeplessness. Another testament to her fertile powers of invention." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Book Review "A starkly dystopian novella reminiscent of George Saunders in its bleak humor, the directness of its prose." -- Los Angeles Times "Russell wrote Sleep Donation over half a decade ago, yet her nightmarish vision of a nation keelhauled by an insomnia epidemic now registers as shockingly prescient. [Russell has] the finest imagination in contemporary fiction.
Sleep Donation is Russell at the height of her formidable powers, at once an eerie evocation of a country whose sins have come home to roost, as well as a deeply personal story of grief and terror." --Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire "Russell's gift is to provide deep immersion in the details, and in Trish's haunting, urgent emotions. Russell offsets . expertly induced unease with humour and wry social commentary." -- The Guardian "Wonderful. Like George Saunders, Russell writes with a Swiftian sense of satire. Russell has a keen sense of dramatic timing and an even sharper ability to turn an internal state into its own weather system." --The Boston Globe "A tense but captivating read, eerie in its prescience.
[A] philosophical meditation on dreams and consciousness, and a moving examination of love and empathy." --BuzzFeed "The combination of Russell's dazzling imagination and virtuosic prose adds up to pleasurable sensory overload." -- Entertainment Weekly "Russell handles the extraordinary in a humorous manner. Sleep Donation 's magical realism flare makes it not your average dystopia." -- GQ "A tense but captivating read, eerie in its prescience. [A] philosophical meditation on dreams and consciousness, and a moving examination of love and empathy." --BuzzFeed "Russell specializes in creating fantastical worlds that hum with recognizable rhythms. She excels at marrying the commonplace with the extraordinary.
" -- Miami Herald "Signature Russell: a fanciful, droll, elaborately thought-through allegory with a dark center. Russell's language . is acrid, luminous, and deft. She will chase down every flicker of ordinary experience and return with descriptions of uncanny aptness. Her sentences both resonate with familiarity and startle with beauty." -- Slate "Weird, hilarious, and brilliant." -- The Millions "An audaciously allegorical novella. As engaging as it is provocative.
" -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review).