From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Staff Pick
This is an utter miracle of a book.
Hayes skillfully blends short essays, journal entries, and photographs into an immersive and revealing look at love, loss, and New York. Despite harrowing events (Hayes’s partner, Oliver Sacks, was diagnosed with inoperable cancer in 2015), the book is a love letter to his adopted city, its inhabitants, and to Oliver. Recommended By Keith M., Powells.com
Insomniac City is a compelling rumination on love, loss, and community. New to New York City, Hayes presents his encounters with fellow New Yorkers in an astonishing series of essays, vignettes, and beautiful photographs. The book centers on Hayes’s relationship with the luminous genius Oliver Sacks. Despite Sacks’s diagnosis and decline from cancer, their love story is of the kind too rarely depicted between gay men: deep, mature, and ultimately joyous. Recommended By Keith M., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
A moving celebration of what Bill Hayes calls "the evanescent, the eavesdropped, the unexpected" of life in New York City, and an intimate glimpse of his relationship with the late Oliver Sacks.
"A beautifully written once-in-a-lifetime book, about love, about life, soul, and the wonderful loving genius Oliver Sacks, and New York, and laughter and all of creation." — Anne Lamott
Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city's incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.
And he unexpectedly fell in love again, with his friend and neighbor, the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose exuberance — "I don't so much fear death as I do wasting life," he tells Hayes early on — is captured in funny and touching vignettes throughout. What emerges is a portrait of Sacks at his most personal and endearing, from falling in love for the first time at age seventy-five to facing illness and death (Sacks died of cancer in August 2015). Insomniac City is both a meditation on grief and a celebration of life. Filled with Hayes's distinctive street photos of everyday New Yorkers, the book is a love song to the city and to all who have felt the particular magic and solace it offers.
Review
"Like Patti Smith's haunting M Train, Hayes' book weaves seemingly disparate threads of memory into a kind of sanctuary — a secret place where one can shake off the treasured relics of past lives and prepare to be reborn anew." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Insomniac City is a beautiful memoir in which Oliver Sacks comes wonderfully to life — a double portrait that also provides a vivid picture of New York City's neighborhoods and people. The ending is exquisitely wrought, heartrending and joyous." Joyce Carol Oates
Review
"Remarkably poignant. Readers will find themselves wishing the two men had more time, but as Hayes makes clear, they wasted none of the time they had." Publishers Weekly
Review
"[A] loving tribute to Sacks and to New York... Read just 50 pages, and you'll see easily enough how Hayes is Sacks's logical complement. Though possessed of different temperaments, both are alive to difference, variety, the possibilities of our rangy humanity; both are avid chroniclers of our species... Frank, beautiful, bewitching-[Hayes's photographs] unmask their subjects' best and truest selves." Jennifer Senior, New York Times
Synopsis
Amazon's Best Biographies and Memoirs of 2017 List
A moving celebration of what Bill Hayes calls "the evanescent, the eavesdropped, the unexpected" of life in New York City, and an intimate glimpse of his relationship with the late Oliver Sacks.
"A beautifully written once-in-a-lifetime book, about love, about life, soul, and the wonderful loving genius Oliver Sacks, and New York, and laughter and all of creation."--Anne Lamott
Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city's incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.
And he unexpectedly fell in love again, with his friend and neighbor, the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose exuberance--"I don't so much fear death as I do wasting life," he tells Hayes early on--is captured in funny and touching vignettes throughout. What emerges is a portrait of Sacks at his most personal and endearing, from falling in love for the first time at age seventy-five to facing illness and death (Sacks died of cancer in August 2015).Insomniac City is both a meditation on grief and a celebration of life. Filled with Hayes's distinctive street photos of everyday New Yorkers, the book is a love song to the city and to all who have felt the particular magic and solace it offers.
About the Author
The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction, Bill Hayes is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the author of four books: Sleep Demons; Five Quarts; The Anatomist; and Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me. His writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books, BuzzFeed, and The Guardian.
Hayes is a photographer as well as a writer. His photos have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Granta, New York Times, and on CBS Evening News. His portraits of his partner, the late Oliver Sacks, appear in the recent collection of Dr. Sacks’s suite of final essays Gratitude.
Hayes, 56 years old, is currently at work on two new books: a volume of his street photography, "How New York Breaks Your Heart" (forthcoming from Bloomsbury, February 2018), and a book in which he explores the history of exercise (Bloomsbury, 2019).