What LAPD cop Parker Hass wants is a world both safe and just for his wife and infant daughter. But then a plague of insomnia strikes. Working undercover as a drug dealer in a Los Angeles ruled in equal parts by martial law and insurgency, Park is tasked with cutting off illegal trade in Dreamer, the only drug that can give the infected their precious sleep. After a year of lost leads, Park stumbles into the perilous shadows cast by the pharmaceutical...

"From journalist and poet Melissa Bond, a gripping account of the author's addiction to benzodiazepines (a family of drugs that includes Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, Ativan) and the hidden dangers they pose. As Melissa mothers her infant daughter and a special-needs one-year-old son, she suffers from unbearable insomnia, sleeping an hour or less each night. She loses her job as a journalist (a casualty of the 2008 recession), and her relationship with...

"As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this...

According to Professor Angus, Estaban was found one day outside of the Sleep Lab one day as a young boy. He was lost and abandoned. Angus and his son Tristan quickly welcomed him into their family and into their field of work, exploring nightmares and allowing patients a good and safe night’s sleep. But, Esteban has been having his own nightmares of late where he wakes up in his old house, reunited with his parents as if they were never separated....

Marina Benjamin's Insomnia is part memoir and part philosophical inquiry into a condition that is on the rise and that can grant us insights into the workings of our unconscious minds. An intense and lyrical personal narrative, it treats insomnia as an experience, not a disorder, drawing on its influences on the arts and sciences throughout history, as well as on Benjamin's own life.