AWAIT
YOUR REPLY by Dan
Chaon
Publisher:
Ballantine
Pub Date: September,
2009
Format: Hardcover
Accolades *
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER (Extended) * Indie
Next List
Brief Description The second novel by the author of the National Book
Award Finalist AMONG THE MISSING.
PRAISE
FOR AWAIT YOUR REPLY “Stunning…. Mr. Chaon succeeds in both creating suspense and making it pay off, but ‘Await Your Reply’ also does something even better. Like the finest of his storytelling heroes, Mr. Chaon manages to bridge the gap between literary and pulp fiction with a clever, insinuating book equally satisfying to fans of either genre. He does travel two roads,
even though that guy David Frost said it wasn’t possible."
—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“Mesmerizing…Despite the ultramodern, Internet-driven elements of its plot, ‘Await Your Reply’ is rooted in the oldest American concerns. ‘What kind of person,’ Miles [one of the characters] wonders in desperation, ‘decides that they can throw everything away and -- reinvent themselves?’ We know the answer to that question; our ancestors are the answer to that question. But other mysteries lurk in this hypnotic novel that you'll never guess.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“ ‘Await Your Reply’ is a riveting thriller, chock-full of plot twists, and a sober meditation on the erosion of identity in the age of technology…. the book itself will, and should, endure. It's a jolt of adrenaline with a strong dose of existential dread, an eerie snapshot of what we lose, and what we risk, when we turn away from those who love us.”
—Steve Almond, The Los Angeles Times
“Chaon artfully weaves three tales of people running away into a gripping, satisfying read.”
—Entertainment Weekly, “The Must List”
“I was completely hooked -- a credit both to Chaon's intricate and suspenseful plotting and to some of the most paranoid material to hit American literature since Don Delillo's White Noise.... ‘Await Your Reply’ is a dark, provocative book; in bringing its three strands together,
Chaon has fashioned a braid out of barbed wire.”
—Lucinda Rosenfeld, The New York Times Book Review
“(4 stars) In the end, Await Your Reply is a story that unfolds with chilling precision.
You'll be spellbound from start to finish.”
—Michelle Green, People
“A tender, melancholy meditation on attachment and loss.”
—Cathleen Medwick, O, The Oprah Magazine
“In his dizzying study of identity in the modern world, Chaon balances the stories of three main characters who, for very different reasons, must reinvent themselves and redefine their
lives….Chaon’s fans will be deeply satisfied by this book, and those who've never read him will get a riveting introduction to one of the great literary minds of our day.”
—Laura Buchwald, The New York Post
“In Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, three stories—a man searching for his mentally ill twin,
a scheming college dropout, and an orphan on the run with her teacher—converge
in a haunting saga of identity and loss.”
—Parade, “Parade Picks”
“Await Your Reply illuminates what it takes to maintain a true
identity, on paper and in perception.”
—Jennifer Kay, Associated Press
“Far more than an absorbing mystery, in this complex and psychologically astute story Dan Chaon put on a virtuosic display of his literary talent. It's a thrilling example of the best of contemporary literary fiction.”
—Harvey Freedenberg, Bookpage
“The brilliant Dan Chaon has done it again. Both a genre-bending whodunit and a profound meditation on identity, AWAIT YOUR REPLY left me breathless with admiration. The pages turn themselves.”
—Justin Cronin, author of The Summer Guest
“I’ve been waiting for somebody to write the essential identity-theft novel, and I'm very glad Dan Chaon's the one to have done it, because he believes in real story and is faithful to the reader.”
—Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections
“This is a stunning and beautiful book. I must have read its final pages half a dozen times, just letting what lay packed and coiled within them settle into me. Out of pure loss, Chaon has created real magnificence. AWAIT YOUR REPLY attains a kind of
blurry, bloodstained perfection.”
—Peter Straub, author of A Dark Matter
“I haven’t had as much sheer fun reading a novel in years. Chaon’s characters are always so beautifully drawn that they hold your attention even when they’re just sitting and thinking. In this breathtaking book, they do that and a whole lot more.”
—Ann Packer, author of The Dive From Clausen’s Pier
“Chaon is to the Midwest what Richard Russo is to the Northeast... It’s a tribute to Chaon’s narrative command that each of these parallel narratives sustains the reader’s interest, even though there’s little indication through two-thirds of the novel that these stories will ever intersect. And when they do, the results are so breathtaking in their inevitability that the reader practically feels compelled to start the novel anew, just to discover the cues that he’s missed along the way.
[Chaon's] stories established his early reputation.
He did that. Now he’s doing this.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Front of magazine essay
“(Starred review) Chaon deftly intertwines a trio of story lines, showcasing his characters’ individuality by threading subtle connections between and among them with effortless finesse, all the while invoking the complexities of what's real and what's fake with mesmerizing brilliance. This novel’s structure echoes that of his well-received debut—also a book of threes—even as it bests that book’s elegant prose, haunting plot and knockout literary excellence.”
—Publishers Weekly “PW Pick of the Week”
Accolades for AWAIT YOUR REPLY
Featured in Entertainment Weekly 2009 Year-End Special: "The Best
Fiction"—12/25 & 1/5
Amazon.com/#66 on “Best of the Year” list—10/27
Selected for Salon.com/ Laura Miller’s “Best of 2009” Fiction Picks—12/9
Featured in The Week's "Best Books of 2009"—12/25 & 1/8
Named New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year—12/6
Named New York Times/Janet Maslin’s 10 Favorite Books of Year—11/27
Selected by Publishers Weekly for "Top 10 Books of
2009"—11/2
Featured in Chicago Tribune's "Favorite Fiction of
2009"—12/4
Named as one of Kansas City Star's Top Books of 2009: Top Six Shortlist—12/4
Named Pittsburgh Post Gazette's Best of the Year—12/27
Akron Beacon Journal (OH)/Best of the Year—12/27
Arizona Republic/Notable Books of 2009—12/12
Media
Coverage:
National Print Parade/Parade Picks—9/6
Associated Press/Review—9/2
New York Times Book Review/Editor’s Choice—8/30
New York Times/daily review—8/20
Wall Street Journal/Q&A—8/21
Wall Street Journal/Review
USA Today
New York Times Book Review/Review—8/23
People/review
Entertainment Weekly/Review and Must List
O Magazine/Review
Bloomberg News/Review
The Onion/Review
Poets & Writers/”Page One” Column—Sept/Oct Issue
Bookpage/Review—September
Southwest Spirit Airlines magazine/Review—August Issue
Library Journal/ Review—6/15
Publishers Weekly/PW Pick of the Week Starred Review—6/8
Kirkus Reviews/Front of the magazine Review/Essay—6/15
PW Show Daily/BEA Feature—5/29
National Radio NPR/Weekend Edition with Liane Hansen
NPR/Fresh Air (Maureen Corrigan review)
Local Media Chicago Tribune/Review—9/5
MetroWest Daily News/Ran AP review—9/6
San Francisco Chronicle/Ran AP review—9/2
Louisville Courier Journal/Ran LA Times review—8/30
Sacramento Bee/New on the Shelves—8/24
Cleveland Scene/interview—8/20
Cape Cod Times/First Words—8/23
Oxford Eagle / interview for Oxford Town
Boston Globe/Review
Los Angeles Times/Review—8/23
Austin American Statesman/Review—8/23
St. Petersburg Times/Review Assigned
Washington Post Book World/Review—8/26
Miami Herald/Review
New York Post/Review
Omaha World Herald/Review
San Antonio Express News/Review
Cleveland Plain Dealer/Review—8/23
Cleveland Magazine/Review—August
Los Angeles Times/Summer Books Preview—6/7
On-Line New York Newsday on-line/Ran AP review—9/3
Batsegundo.com/Interview—10/19
Popmatters.com/Q & A
The Rumpus/Review and Q & A—week of 8/25
Caroline Leavitt’s blog/Q & A—8/12
Kepler’s Well-Read Donkey/Q & A—8/20
1st Book blog/Q & A
Newshour Arts Beat blog/review—8/26
Curled Up with a Good Book.com/Review
The Millions blogspot/Q & A with Dan—8/25
Video Trailer
Prior
Endorsements and Reviews “YOU REMIND ME OF ME is
one of the strangest, most beautiful, most compelling books I've read in
a long time. Unnerving and real, intricately plotted, wonderfully
written, it's a Chinese box of a novel, full of hidden pleasures and
surprises.”
—Elizabeth McCracken, author of The
Giants House and Niagara Falls
All Over Again
"Dan
Chaon's novel You Remind Me Of Me
is nothing short of brilliant. The novel is haunting me and I can't stop
thinking about it--both as a reader and as a deeply admiring writer. I
wish I had a better adjective than superb."
—Caroline Leavitt, author of Girls
in Trouble
"One
of Dan Chaon's many gifts is his ability to probe deeply and delicately
into sorrow. This gift serves him beautifully in You Remind me of Me, a
novel about adoption, about the quiet sadness that lies at the bottom of
all his characters' troubles."
—Jane Hamilton, author of A
Map of The World
“Beautiful,
painful, and sure-footed, YOU REMIND ME OF ME tracks the delicate
connections between a handful of lost and poignant lives, in the process
giving them the radiance of a stained glass window. What a writer. Dan
Chaon is going to have a breathtaking literary career.”
—Peter Straub
“Dan
Chaon's meticulous and insightful novel "You Remind Me of Me"
is such an important achievement….it is fundamentally a tale of
identity sought, borrowed, rejected and then reborn in the minds of its
characters. But Chaon does not let the reader off with simple
conclusions. Rather, he reminds us constantly how much in fluctuation
life's choices really are, and how much we contribute to our own views
of what we have become. The novel is also a riddle about connections,
and it begins in four apparently disparate directions that eventually
come together with an unsettling and heartrending unity.”
--David Hellman is a librarian at
San Francisco State University and past chairman of the American Library
Association's Notable Books Council
(for Among
the Missing)
"One of the best
short story writers around . . . Dan Chaon’s stories are funny,
heartbreaking, beautifully written, and intelligently conceived." –Lorrie Moore
Bestselling author of Birds of America
"An important collection of stories. A genuinely literary
accomplishment." –Ha Jin
National Book Award-winning author
"With a story like [‘Big Me’] from the marvelous writer Dan
Chaon, I am confronted not only with an unfathomable mystery such as
that of the endurance of a single human identity over time, but also
with new proof of the enduring value of telling tales in the ongoing
struggle to understand those mysteries." –Michael Chabon
Pulitzer Prize-winning author
"These
stories are filled with a wicked innocence, a wonderful way of seeing what
is new in the way we live the lives we've grown used to. He makes us feel
the fearfulness available--given the right light, the wrong music--from
the ordinary. He honors his readers and his characters with direct
language, compelling moments, and a chance to see clearly what is coming
toward them." --Frederick Busch
"Dan Chaon writes
with superlative craft and compassion about people who step out of their
ordinary lives and into mysteries. These are wonderful stories: tough,
spooky and full of heart." --Jean Thompson, author of National Book Award Nominee Who Do You Love?
"With searing tenderness and astonishing grace, Dan Chaon
conjures the magical worlds where a young widow may glimpse the divine in an inflatable doll or a flamboyant macaw may repeat
a rapist's mocking words. These are stories with dark edges, peopled by characters who face the limits of rage and despair.
But in the midst of turmoil, Dan Chaon holds fast to his own sense of the whimsical and the absurd. He sees his people with delight;
he offers us visions of hope and awe through his own fearless compassion." ---Melanie Rae Thon
"In AMONG THE MISSING, Dan Chaon movingly parses the omnipresence of absence in our lives. Among the missing in these stories are: a brother-in-law imprisoned for serial rape; the children of a lonely sperm donor; a family mysteriously drowned in a car; a runaway mother; a lost son; a dead husband; a stillborn daughter; and the million imaginary inhabitants of Beck, Nebraska. And, most importantly, the many missing persons that comprise a self, those versions of ourselves that we abandon over the years and that "end up nearly forgotten, mumbling and gasping for air in some tenement room of our consciousness." Among the found is Dan Chaon, a brilliant and important new voice in American fiction. We will all be reading his mysterious and beautiful stories sooner or later. I suggest sooner." --David Jauss (author of BLACK MAPS)
"Within these pages Chaon's lonely protagonists struggle to invent or erase themselves. Their histories are disordered, their futures uncertain. But for the reader the pleasures involved are indelible. These are memorable, mighty stories told by a master. An asbolutely stupendous collection! I recommend it with all my heart." Karen Joy Fowler,
author of Sarah Canary, The Sweetheart Season and Black Glass
"AMONG
THE MISSING is moving, powerful, clear-eyed and compassionate. Dan Chaon can
compress grief, rage, passion and forgiveness into a page, a paragraph, a sentence--the palm of a hand.
This is a terrific book." Leigh Allison Wilson,
author of Wind and From the Bottom Up
"AMONG
THE MISSING is a startling glimpse into Dan Chaon's strange fictional world. In tight clean prose he renders story after story brimming with equal parts menace and grace. His stories haunt and amaze
lingering like great fiction should." Elwood Reid,
author of If I Don't Six and What Salmon Know
Reviews
“Three
lives viewed through a kaleidoscope of memories and secret pain assume a
kind of mythical dimension in Chaon’s piercingly poignant tale of
fate, chance and search for redemption. As he demonstrated in his short
story collection Among the Missing,
Chaon has a sensitive radar for the daily routines of people striving to
escape the margins of poverty and establish meaningful lives.
…Chaon’s clarity of observation, expressed in restrained, nuanced
prose, coupled with his compassion for his flawed characters, creates a
heart-wrenching story of people searching for connection.” Forecast:
Readers of Kent Haruf will find similarities here, in the settings in
small towns on the Great Plains and in the dignified portrayal of people
leading secret, stoic lives. Eight-city author tour. --Publishers
Weekly (STARRED REVIEW)
"Acclaimed
storywriter Chaon (AMONG THE MISSING,2001,etc) affirms his matchless
skill in crafting the small sketch...The initial handful of chapters
here, in fact, read like a fresh collection of stories, distinguished as
usual by the shy, cutting honesty of Chaon's prose...his final vignette
leaves the reader astonished once again...[a] powerful, promising
writer." --Kirkus
"Chaon
follow a ravishing short story collection, AMONG THE MISSING (2001),
with a grimly compelling first novel...Chaon's finely crafted novel is
cogent and suspenseful." --Booklist
“In
this impressive intergenerational saga from onetime National Book Award
finalist Dan Chaon, the modern American family is barely family at all:
Its members are variously orphaned, abandoned or absentee….Chaon's
restless narrative zooms back and forth from the 1960s to the 1970s to
the 1990s, constantly updating, revisiting and revealing. Each turn of
"You Remind Me of Me" adds another layer of flesh — and
mystery — to Jonah, Troy and their forlorn mother, three archetypal
Americans who don't know each other from Adam but are bound together
nevertheless.” --Los Angeles Times
“Chaon’s
meticulous pacing, and the controlled nuance with which he (an adoptee
who has written about his own awkward meeting with his natural father)
handles Jonah’s and Troy’s interaction, make this a quietly
ambitious novel”. --Time Out New York
“Chaon
deftly reveals the quiet suffering of ordinary people in a way that can
be uncomfortably realistic but is always compelling”. --People
“Chaon’s
remarkable first novel begins with snapshots that recall his talent for
short stories (his 2001 collection, Among the missing, was a
National Book Award finalist)”. --Entertainment Weekly
“You
remind Me of Me is not technically horror or suspense, but it does
generate plenty of tension, in its very sensitivity to tha perils and
misadventures of domestic life. … Chaon plays with the reader’s
expectations in a way that is accomplished and full of pleasure for
lovers of good suspense fiction, and You remind Me of Me, along
with its literary merits, is a very good scary novel. … You remind
Me of Me, expertly written and crafted, is an admirable first novel
and one of this year’s most involving and satisfying fictions”. --The Plain Dealer
“You remind Me of Me is the first novel by an author already
established for mournful, eloquent short stories with a tone reminiscent
of Russell Banks’s. Mr. Chaon’s stories heve been about emotional
ellipses in his characters’ lonely lives”. --New York Times
“
… vivid, unadorned prose, which manages at once to be precise and
dreamlike. …the book succeeds because it makes us feel its
characters’ pain and inhabit a world in which desperate measures often
seem like the only ones avaliable”. --Washington Post
“You
Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon (Ballantine, $24.95), another debut novel,
is a kaleidoscope of memories, painful revelations and tragic legacies
that converge to become a piercing and poignant tale….At first these
chapters read like a series of short stories, but then the common
threads begin to emerge, and the author seamlessly weaves a tale of
family relations and fate. This first novel by National Book Award
finalist Dan Chaon is sometimes painful but always provocative in its
steadfast portrayal of people pushed beyond their limits." PW Daily--Kristin Kloberdanz, a
journalist with Time, offers these recommendations in a recent article
in the Chicago Tribune
"In
his masterly first novel, Chaon tells an absorbing tale of fate and the
struggle for recovery and human connection.Readers who prefer expertly crafted plottingand strong characterization will be drawn to this novel.
Highly recommended for public library system with an emphasis on
literary fiction and for anyone interested in promising first
novelists."
--Library Journal (STARRED
REVIEW)
"Chaon's
masterful effort from 2001, Among
the Missing (a National Book
Award finalist,) was, as it turns out, merely the precursor to something
even better: specific case in point, his new novel, You
Remind Me of Me. ….Chaon's
great gift — the ability to submerge readers into the heart and soul
of a character with a rarified economy of words — is happily playing
as the marqueed forefront in this superb new book. ….Chaon
fans will find great satisfaction in this, his return to an examination
of the magnificently complicated existences of just plain folk." --The
Boox Review
(for Among the Missing) From
Publishers Weekly
In the 12 quietly accomplished stories of his second collection, Chaon
explores the complicated geography of human relationships, from the
unintentional failures and minute betrayals of daily existence to the
numbing grief caused by abandonment, disappearance or death. Specific
and disquieting absences an uncle who killed himself, a mother who
vanished, a friend who was kidnapped haunt the protagonists, and a
series of metaphoric and literal stand-ins take the place of what's
missing. In "Safety Man," a dummy intended for crime
deterrence propped in the passenger seat, it looks like a male companion
becomes a kind of surrogate husband for a young widow, and for her
daughters, an inflatable father; in "I Demand to Know Where You're
Taking Me," a woman caring for her incarcerated brother-in-law's
macaw comes to loathe the bird, its ugly talk transforming it into a
symbol of everything wrong and incomprehensible about him. By and large,
Chaon's characters are citizens of the emotional hinterlands, lonely
even when surrounded: "How did people go about falling in love,
getting married, having families, living their lives?" Even those
who think they know the answers recognize their powerlessness, such as
the father who, looking into his son's eyes, thinks, "I am aware
that hatred is a definite possibility at the end of the long tunnel of
parenthood, and I suspect that there is little one can do about
it." And yet these stories are neither morbid nor even particularly
melancholic. Singularly dedicated to an examination of all the
profundity and strangeness of the quotidian, they are, in their best
moments, unsettling, moving, even beautiful. (July 3)Forecast: A jacket
blurb by Lorrie Moore and a five-city author tour may help sell this
understated collection, which will be respectfully reviewed but may be
overlooked on bookstore shelves.
Copyright
2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library
Journal
Short stories don't usually get this much hype a two-page spread in the
catalog, no less but Chaon has done well with his works: they have
appeared in the "Distinguished Stories" section of The
Pushcart Prize six times and in Best American Short Stories three times.
These pieces focus on people just trying to get by in America today.
Copyright
2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Amazon.com's
Best of 2001
Dan Chaon opens his new collection of stories with an epigraph from
Raymond Carver: "Whatever this was all about, it was not a vain
attempt--journey." This is pretty opaque stuff from Carver, a
writer not much given to mystification. But it strikes just the right
note for Chaon's assembly of characters, a group vaguely unsettled by
life, trying to make the best of it. First and foremost, this is a book
beset by moms. You get the feeling that the characters in Among the
Missing never really had a chance to figure out the world, with
these cryptic, uncommunicative women to care for them. In the title
story, for example, a car is discovered at the bottom of a local lake,
with an entire family drowned inside. The college-age narrator, however,
is preoccupied by the more mundane puzzle of his parents' relationship.
"Somehow," he recounts, "they'd stayed married for twenty
years, and then, abruptly, somehow they'd decided to give up. It didn't
quite make sense, and I looked at them, for a minute aware of the other
mystery in my life. 'Do you want some soup?' my mother asked, as if I
were a customer."
That's
about as much as you'll ever get out of one of Chaon's mothers: soup.
When not fielding their aging parents' passivity, these characters seem
to spend a lot of time grappling with ghosts. The "missing" of
the title story are, literally, gone. In "Safety Man," a widow
comes to rely on one of those inflatable dolls meant to intimidate
intruders. In "Prosthesis," a young wife and mother falls for
a stranger with a missing arm; meanwhile, she watches her son grow up
and away from her, "disappearing into his own thoughts and
feelings." In the end, Chaon is the rare writer who deserves
comparison to Carver: both write an affectless prose that takes on a
surprisingly emotional life of its own. --Claire Dederer
(for Fitting
Ends)
From Publishers Weekly
Anyone who has ever toyed with the idea of staying in school an extra
year in order to delay the sobering responsibilities of adulthood will
identify with the people in Chaon's first collection. Familial burdens,
sexual confusion and unchallenging jobs are just a few of the
impediments to the happiness of these 20-something characters, leaving
them disillusioned and powerless to move on. It is especially poignant
in ``Rapid Transit,'' when the transition from fair-haired collegian to
entry-level lackey stirs up some scary emotions. In ``Fraternity,'' a
party-boy rejects reality even as ``the music faded, the lights came
up.'' Many seek constancy from family members, only to find that they
too are changing beyond their control. One man looks to his ailing
grandmother for some order, while another hunts down his biological
mother to provide ``whatever's missing'' in his life. Mired in the
present, the characters often glorify the past: ``Scott had felt ashamed
to have such fond memories, and so little desire to start over.'' The
stories are deftly written and brilliantly structured, with titillating
beginnings and somewhat cryptic endings. The prospect for this
generation is not grim, Chaon seems to say; it's just uncertain.
Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library
Journal
News reports from small towns on the Nebraska prairie tend to dwell on
the greying of a way of life, but Chaon's first collection of short
stories is more concerned with the life still taking place that passes
underneath the radar of public regard. Thus, "Transformations"
tells of the homecoming of a newly uncloseted homosexual from the point
of view of his younger brother; "Dread" is the story of a
young man living with his brother and sister-in-law in Chicago who
spills the beans about his brother's affair. Most of the stories deal
simply with simple themes (the exception being "My Sister's
Honeymoon: A Videotape," a more experimental piece about a brother
reflecting on the changes brought about by his sister's marriage that is
organized by the time tag of a video camera). It is in the telling, the
subtle shifts of perspective, and the transformation of character in a
short space that distinguish Chaon as a writer to watch. Though most of
his stories seem suspended rather than concluded (an unfortunate
trademark of university writing programs, of which Chaon is a product),
this is a very respectable first effort; it's unfortunate that the high
hardcover price might keep this work out of smaller libraries. For
collections of literary fiction.
