"One of The Guardian’s Best Books of 2017"
"A meditation on the ways our dreams unmoor us--from ourselves, from one another, from the most basic sense of duration."<b>---Dan Piepenbring, <i>The New Yorker</i></b>
"This is a celebratory enterprise, an ideal present for readers who are already fans. . . . Barabtarlo has a masterly command of Nabokov’s life and work."<b>---Eric Naiman, <i>Times Literary Supplement</i></b>
"[D]ream notes are at the heart of <i>Insomniac Dreams</i>, and are surrounded by helpful and intriguing background material."<b>---Michael Wood, <i>New York Review of Books</i></b>
"Nabokov's actual accounts of his dreams . . . are fantastic, and show in raw form the wit, facility, and inherent discipline of language easily recognizable as Nabokov’s handiwork. The author’s fans will be fascinated by the obsessions, fears, preoccupations, and minutiae revealed without filter or guard. . . . The note cards alone . . . will fortify Nabokov scholars for years to come."
Publishers Weekly
"Utterly fascinating."<b>---William Boyd, <i>The Guardian</i></b>
"Handsomely designed . . . [t]his is a looping, chronologically complicated book full of the kind of sleep-deprived, iridescently edged complexity that likes to gather around Vladimir Nabokov’s work."<b>---Nicholson Baker, <i>New Republic</i></b>
"[T]he volume’s foray into the subconscious is a suggestive . . . addition to the canon of Nabokoviana.”"<b>---Francisco Unger, <i>Essays in Criticism</i></b>
"For the casual reader drawn to big ideas, <i>Insomniac Dreams</i> can be as challenging as trying to reconstruct a dinosaur skeleton from a few simple bones. But it's a fascinating read for all the questions it raises—some of which the world's best minds have been tackling for centuries."<b>---James Plath, <i>PopMatters</i></b>
"<i>Insomniac Dreams</i> voices [Nabokov’s] ongoing translation, rereading and appraisal of his past selves during his lifetime, as well as his assured awareness of the reader’s voracious desire to sift through the detritus of his words and thoughts."<b>---Melissa Purkiss, <i>Oxonian Review</i></b>