Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep, and Dreams

"Elegantly written. . . . Alvarez . . . lead[s] you to a new understanding of the night. You will no longer look out into the darkness and see only a yawning void."—Kevin Coyne, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

Alvarez begins this delightful, serendipitous meditation on night, darkness, sleep, dreams and night life by discussing his own childhood terror of the dark, in a home seething with nighttime quarrels, and his middle-age addiction to sleep. He then visits an English sleep research lab, where he has his sleep monitored; travels to New York City to ride in a police squad car with cops on night patrol; and captures the nocturnal rhythms of London and of a Tuscan farmhouse in the Italian Appennines. In graceful, insightful prose, Alvarez (The Savage God: A Study of Suicide) analyzes imagery of light and dark from Shakespeare to John Cheever; scrutinizes the dream theories of Freud and Jung; examines dreams as a source of inspiration for Coleridge, Ionesco, Don DeLillo, French surrealists and scientists and inventors; and mulls the late-Victorian passion for ghost stories. His observation, ``Night contains whatever you care to put into it,'' serves as an apt keynote for this kaleidoscopic excursion. (Jan.)

A. Alvarez is a highly acclaimed poet, novelist, literary critic, and author. He lives in London.