In Inspired Sleep, Robert Cohen, author of the prizewinning novel The Here and Now, offers a brilliant and exhilarating tale of a woman looking for love -- and sleep -- in all the wrong places.

Bonnie Saks of Cambridge, Massachusetts, needs help. Her unfinished dissertation is flung across her desk. Her ex-husband has decamped to South America, leaving her with their two sons. And most pressingly of all, she has a debilitating case of insomnia. So when she sees a sign that asks, ARE YOU SLEEPING TOO LITTLE?, Bonnie immediately signs up for a state-of-the-art study. Under the care of Ian Ogelvie, a hotshot researcher with visionary ideas, and with the aid of an experimental drug, she enters a vague and happy dream state that may or may not be good for her.

With a keen, panoramic eye, Inspired Sleep encompasses everything from the slippery evasions of love to the intricate network of commerce that binds together Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, and managed care. It gives us a richly satiric and exuberant portrait of millennial America -- its believers, hustlers, prospering careerists, and shadow population of lost, sleepless souls -- dramatizing one of the most salient questions of our times: Are antidepressant drugs an escape from or a channel to our genuine selves? It is at once both profoundly illuminating and terrifically funny.

From the Back Cover
“Wild and often ingenious. . . . Inspired all the way to its unexpected and clever conclusion.” –The New York Times Book Review

“[Cohen’s] writing is so smooth and his tale so believable . . . you are caught and there is no escape until long after the final page is turned.” –Denver Post

“Cohen’s talented novel [is] not so much a ‘how we live now’ as a wild and often ingenious ‘how we fall apart.’ I wonder if anyone has done insomnia so well since Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘When You’re Lying Awake With a Dismal Headache.’”The New York Times

“Smartly observed and stylishly written. . . It’s not the interpretation of dreams but the meaning of our waking hours that is up for grabs here.” –The New Yorker

“A sparkling comic novel of postmodern pathologies. . . . Crisp and scathingly intelligent.” –Chicago Tribune

“Moves effortlessly between the hilarious and the heartbreaking. . . . Inspired all the way.” –The New York Times Book Review
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author
Robert Cohen has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Pushcart Prize, and other awards. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, GQ, and other publications. He lives in Middlebury, Vermont. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Keywords: Inspired Sleep: A Novel, Books, Robert Cohen, Women graduate students, Fiction, Cambridge (Mass.), Sleep disorders, Divorced women, Popular American Fiction, Fiction - General, Humorous