So Many Ways to Sleep Badly

Product Description

“Sycamore kicks mainstream literature in the teeth.”—The San Francisco Bay Guardian
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s exhilarating novel is about struggling to find hope in the ruins of everyday San Francisco—battling roaches, Bikram Yoga, chronically bad sex, NPR, internet cruising, tweakers, the cops, $100 bills, chronic pain, the gay vote, vegan restaurants and incest, with the help of air-raid sirens, herbal medicine, late-night epiphanies, sea lions and sleeping pills. So Many Ways to Sleep Badly unveils a gender-bending queer world where nothing flows smoothly, except for those sudden moments when everything becomes lighter or brighter or easier to imagine.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the gender-bending author of the highly praised novel Pulling Taffy and the editor of the anthology Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity. Sycamore writes regularly for a variety of publications, including Bitch, Utne Reader, AlterNet, Make/Shift and MaximumRocknRoll.

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist (
Pulling Taffy) and nonfiction anthologist (
Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity) Sycamore is back with an ambitious but less-than-compelling satire of drug-fueled, gender-bending San Francisco subculture. The narrator, who may or may not be genetically female, fills days and many late nights with relentless sexual encounters and vivid ruminations concerning random sex, hustling, cocaine and other party drugs; occasionally, she takes time out for a rare healthy habit, vikram yoga, and to worry about her apartment’s roach-and-rodent infestation. Obviously inspired by the stream-of-consciousness and day-in-the-life classics of Joyce, Woolf and Beckett, here the pointed commentary falls flat; the problem isn’t San Francisco’s eccentric denizens, but Sycamore’s profane meanderings, too much of which isn’t especially insightful or funny. The narrator takes far too long to move beyond the bitchy play-by-play, making sure that, by the time Sycamore introduces genuine stakes, readers will already feel too bored and browbeaten to care.
(Oct.)
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Review

“So Many Ways to Sleep Badly is a perfectly tidy mess, a Sex in the Other City—only these sexual escapades and flailing urges are truly transgressive and flamboyantly hilarious at every turn. Sycamore deftly skewers a landscape that’s been completely sacked by mindless consumerism and unchecked gentrification, whether it’s a Whole Foods customer whining, “Which fish is the least fishy?” or an earnest yoga practitioner bragging about opening a factory in China. And hallelujah: this refreshingly frenetic and innovative second novel is unabashedly political, but without being formulaic or reductive. It is a book that has done nothing less than invent its own language—and I promise it’ll still be singing to you long after you close your eyes at night.”—T Cooper, author of Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes and Some of the Parts
“Mattilda’s brilliance makes stream-of-consciousness a lifestyle, a state-of-consciousness. This is an entire lived life’s worth of heartshaking honesty, arch observation, searing vulnerabilty and craving and seeking, all in one breathtakingly poetic (and hilarious) book.”—Michelle Tea, author of Valencia and Rose of No Man’s Land”Like the best writers that have come before—Wojnarowicz, Lou Reed, Burroughs—Sycamore has boiled life and times down to a resin that you could almost grind, cut up and snort. There is no one else on this planet that could write this book. Dare I say it’s a classic? Yes, and I dare you to read it.”—Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters”Reading a chapter of this amazing book is like when someone throws you into the deep end and you don’t know how to swim. You feel like you’re gonna drown, like how am I going to do this? You can’t breathe and you flail and start to sink, you’re freezing but then you feel br