Overview

"Sometimes I think that carrying--other people, the continuity of history, generational identity, the emotional load of the everyday--is the main thing that women do. In Marina Benjamin's new set of interlinked essays, she turns her astute eye to the tasks once termed ""women's work"". From cooking and cleaning to caring for an aging relative, A Little Give depicts domestic life anew: as a site of paradox and conflict, but also of solace and profound meaning. Here, productivity sits alongside self-erasure, resentment with tenderness, and the animal self is never far away, perpetually threatening to break through. Drawing on the work of figures such as Natalia Ginzburg, Paula Rego, and Virginia Woolf, Benjamin writes with fierce candor of the struggle to overwrite the gender conditioning that pulls her back into ""the mud-world of pre-feminism"" even as she attempts to haul herself out. From her upbringing as the child of immigrants with fixed traditional values, to looking after her mother and seeing her teenager move out of home, she examines her relationships with with family, community, her body, even language itself. Ultimately, she shows that a woman's true work may lie at the heart of her humanity, in the pursuit both of transformation and of deep acceptance."

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9781957363455

Table of Contents

Reviews

"""Bold and tender, fierce and true--I loved it."" --Rachel Seiffert, author of A Boy In Winter ""Benjamin is brilliant at evoking the everyday and the unspoken, those most intimate moments that are often left out of the public idea of a life ... No one writes more movingly, or with more intellectual breadth and incisiveness, about the lived experiences of women."" --Sandra Newman, author of The Heavens ""A small book with a big heart, A Little Give re-humanizes those household chores that fall to women--cleaning, cooking, picking up after others, caring for elders, the constant emotional labor involved--and lights up the meaning of dailiness."" -- Beth Macy, author of Dopesick and Raising Lazarus ""Brave and curious, an examination of what it means to live and care."" --Emilie Pine, author of Notes to Self ""A Little Give is one of those books that reorients our sense of how society is ordered. Its interlinked pieces take another look at those human tasks traditionally designated as ""women's work"" and recasts them as profound and essential acts of labor and love."" --Geordie Williamson, The Australian ""Acerbic and tender all at once, A Little Give voices the unspeakable tangle of feelings that assail women in middle age. I can think of few writers so astute and exact as Marina Benjamin."" --Katherine May, author of Wintering ""Marina Benjamin can take the everyday ... and transform it into deeply affecting prose."" --Francesca Brown, Stylist ""With its unfailing attentiveness to the sensory and emotional textures of everyday life, Marina Benjamin's beautiful writing feels like a model of good care. A wry, absorbing, and very moving book."" --Josh Cohen, author of How To Live. What To Do. ""We all know the existential funk that housework can incite, women more so than men as they have traditionally carried the load. Not to mention the mixed emotions that go with caring for others. Marina Benjamin ruminates on the historical and societal pressures, constraints and value of this work through the lens of her own Iraqi-Jewish family--her dynamic, frustrated mother who drummed into her that ""women were put on this planet to please"" and her creative father who didn't question that being looked after was his due. No simple solutions are offered. Instead, she rewardingly riffs on the visceral push and pull of this work."" --Cameron Woodhead, The Sydney Morning Herald ""[An] exquisite book ... Benjamin's essays investigate the social and philosophical dimensions of housework, tracing the fine filaments that bind women to a system of gender inequality ... It zigzags between memory, discovery and reflection, taking the reader to the heart of the essay form. It is a journeying style of writing that constantly drives at its ideas without needing to be sure of their endpoints; it expects a question, not an answer."" --Camilla Nelson, The Conversation ""Energetic and thought-provoking."" --Vicki Renner, ArtsHub ""It's a book you can sink into and return to, for the wisdom of its reflection and the beauty of its sentences."" --Jo Case, InDaily ""A wonderful memoir by one of my favorite contemporary writers and thinkers."" -- Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance and Signal Fires ""Benjamin's overriding mission ... is to render the invisible visible ... As I read A Little Give, my thoughts kept returning to the performance art projects carried out by Mierle Laderman Ukeles throughout the 1970s. In one, she shook hands with 8,500 sanitation workers, thanking them for ""keeping New York City alive"". In another, she washed the steps at the entrance to the Wadsworth Atheneum museum in Hartford, Connecticut, rendering visible the work of low-paid custodial staff. Her point was that maintenance is undervalued. Benjamin's thoughtful book demonstrates the many ways in which it still is."" --Amy Walters, The Canberra Times ""[A] warm, engaging work, no matter the reader's gender."" --Red Tape Praise for Insomnia: Named a Best Book of the Year by BuzzFeed An American Booksellers Association Indie Next Pick ""A short, ludic book about long white nights ... [Benjamin] writes feelingly about the frustrations of being awake when you don't want to be ... Her moans about her futile thought-loops alternate with flattering descriptions of her radiant nocturnal consciousness."" --The New Yorker ""Velvety ruminations on night wakefulness ... Benjamin's mind works like a wide-roving trawler that rakes an area repeatedly before moving on to adjacent territory ... Insomnia turns out to be somewhat of a celebration of sleeplessness as well as a lament ... and is filled with memorable images."" --Heller McAlpin, NPR ""[A] slim, thoughtful book."" --Ron Charles, The Washington Post ""Elegant, provocative ... In Benjamin's writing, it becomes clear that the mysteriousness of the night, its blurred boundaries, its endlessly subtle tonal variations, is a precious space, particularly for those of us who do not naturally fare well in the harsh light of the sun. Better, then, to stay in the gentle glow of the moon, beneath the hot, infinite sparks of the stars above, and set our own schedules, make up our own rules, in accordance with who we want to be, not who we're told we must become."" --Kristin Iversen, NYLON ""A svelte work of nonfiction that bridges memoir and the history of sleeplessness ... Benjamin has written three other memoirs and she knows her way around the form, drawing out personal details and reminiscences and connecting them to a larger history of sleep and its discontents ... She pings between mythological stories of sleepers and gods of sleep, dreamers and insomniacs, as well as cultural and literary approaches to sleeplessness. Like a night-ride through an insomniac's mind, Benjamin's book moves from thought to thought, driven by tangential linkages rather than logical progression ... But the writing itself is so luminous that you hardly notice ... It's writing like this, effortless as a sleeping dog, that carries you through Insomnia, the kind of book for those late hours of the night, keeping you company when you're most alone."" --Colin Dickey, Los Angeles Times ""Benjamin's impassioned and elegant memoir is not just an intimate account of a disorder for which there is still no straightforward cure, but a defiant celebration of its paradoxical potential ... Her key idea, approached via detours into history, philosophy and art, is that the inability to sleep is not just a symptom of an underlying pathology but an existential experience that can give us fresh insights into the nature of creativity and love."" --Elizabeth Lowry, The Guardian ""An insomniac's ideal sleep aid--and that's a compliment. With her collage of ruminations about sleeplessness, [Benjamin] promises no real cure ... What she offers instead is a rare kind of companionship ... Her slim book is what the doctor ordered."" --The Atlantic ""A short book of short meditations and explorations of sleeplessness and its discontents from a well-read writer. Buy two and put one in the guest room!"" --Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ""Benjamin's prose is poetic and punchy ... Insomnia offers a new way of looking at an old disorder"" --Winnipeg Free Press ""Poetic and insightful, profound and magical, personal and universal, Benjamin nails insomnia in short paragraphs and extended passages ... This memoir is not an organized narrative that leads to a cure, but rather an honest voice of one who suffers in the dark without sleep."" --Heidi Simmons, Coachella Valley Weekly ""Benjamin's technique has a nocturnal cast, her night thoughts following their own strange logic, bleeding into one another ... As Benjamin depicts the experience, the insomniac exists in a liminal state, poised between sleep and waking, light and darkness. She vividly evokes this neither-here-nor-there situation, with its heightened sensitivity to ambient light and sounds ... If we can learn to be sensible to these liminal states in which thought refuses to follow a linear path, Benjamin suggests, then we can free ourselves from entrenched ways of thinking and open up new possibilities ... Benjamin boldly points the way toward new and productive ways of living."" --Andrew Schenker, Los Angeles Review of Books ""Insomnia reads like insomnia feels--fluid prose, streaming through Marina Benjamin's experience of sleeplessness, weaving in insights from literature, art, philosophy, and psychology. It's an ethereal but profound exploration of our relationship with sleep and darkness, and especially of women's relationship to sleep--why we're drawn to cultural depictions of women in deep sleep, what keeps them awake. Benjamin's connections are lucid and illuminating, and joining her through them feels like sharing a quiet late-night conversation"" --Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed ""In sensitive, incantatory prose, Benjamin recounts her lifelong experience with sleeplessness, a cruel effect of the mind's inability to let the body go ... Flip to any page of Insomnia. Slip into the current of Benjamin's wandering thoughts. Stay with her through the night. The memoir, structured like a lengthy, meandering essay, is full of pleasing detours ... We stay by Benjamin's side to attend to our own mysteries, our own glimmering darkness"" --Rajat Singh, The Rumpus ""Benjamin's late-night ruminations on the power of sleeplessness, and specifically the relationship women have long had with sleep, are thoughtful and poetic. Benjamin's words will both captivate you and, somehow, allow you to rest easier."" --Samantha Zabell, Apartment Therapy ""Marina Benjamin's slim book exploring insomnia offers an odd yet captivating journey through the nature of sleep."" --Frannie Jackson, Paste ""Intense, vagrant, and personal ... Richly stocked with literary references to lack of sleep, its pains and occasional pleasures ... A book that attempts stylistically to sound like its subject: fragmented, digressive, at times delirious ... Benjamin gives us the essayistic equivalent of a dead-of-night drift into wakefulness and then beyond into worry, fantasy, and invention. Insomnia ought to be read not as self-help, but as an addition to that venerable philosophic genre, the consolation. It might keep you awake, but in solacing and inquiring company."" --Brian Dillon, 4Columns ""Marina Benjamin confronts insomnia, a sleep disorder that is on the rise. Through her personal experience with insomnia, Benjamin details that it can be used for good, as a a vessel for creativity. That when we can't sleep we are granted valuable insight 'into the unconscious mind.' Interestingly, Insomnia brings attention to the relationship between women and sleep, from Penelope weaving for Odysseus to the stresses that keep modern women awake each night."" --Women.com ""Wakefulness, insomnia's antithesis, aptly describes the book's gestures and rhythm. Brief paragraphs, separated by pauses, act as voltages of insight between blank spaces. Throughout the narrative, Benjamin interrogates the ancient mystery behind insomnia, reserving judgment about the possibilities of renewal from what might be considered a curse ... Insomnia is ultimately a book about the contradictions that permeate our natures. Having enjoyed it and been edified, I will look differently upon a sleepless night and will invite the light that stubbornly refuses to diminish while illuminating the darkness."" --Judith Harris, On the Seawall ""Marina Benjamin's Insomnia is more than a memoir; the book haunts with its journeys into what unsettles us in the night."" --Largehearted Boy ""A capacious, lyrical meditation on her elusive quest for sleep ... A vivid portrayal of wakefulness that will strike a chord of recognition in many readers."" --Kirkus Reviews ""A beautiful blend of material, written in short sections that are artfully woven together. Fellow insomniacs will be particularly drawn to this book, but really it's a book for anyone who likes beautiful, idea-driven prose. Benjamin digs deeply into the subject and asks questions and draws conclusions that feel fresh and vital."" --Rebecca Hussey, Book Riot, 1 of 5 Small-Press Books You Won't Want to Miss ""Every insomniac knows how sleeplessness warps and deforms reality. Marina Benjamin anatomizes its endless nights and red-eyed mornings, finding a sublime language for this strange state of lack. Her writing is often reminiscent of Anne Carson: beautiful, jagged, and precise."" --Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City ""An exquisite meditation on time, the dark hours, and the complexities of longtime love, Insomnia is a poetic journey into the wide-awake, generous, exciting mind of Marina Benjamin. I couldn't put it down, and my own inner world is richer for it."" --Dani Shapiro, author of Hourglass ""A sublime view of the treasures and torments to be found in wakefulness. Entertaining and existential, the brightest star in this erudite, nocturnal reverie in search of lost sleep is the beauty of the writing itself."" --Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk ""Benjamin writes beautifully. This is a graceful rumination on the 'wicked kind of trespass' that is insomnia, a work cogent and allusive as a lucid dream, a palimpsest of insights to dip into, day or night."" --Anna Funder, author of Stasiland"

"""Bold and tender, fierce and true--I loved it."" --Rachel Seiffert, author of A Boy In Winter ""Benjamin is brilliant at evoking the everyday and the unspoken, those most intimate moments that are often left out of the public idea of a life ... No one writes more movingly, or with more intellectual breadth and incisiveness, about the lived experiences of women."" --Sandra Newman, author of The Heavens ""A small book with a big heart, A Little Give re-humanizes those household chores that fall to women--cleaning, cooking, picking up after others, caring for elders, the constant emotional labor involved--and lights up the meaning of dailiness."" -- Beth Macy, author of Dopesick and Raising Lazarus ""Brave and curious, an examination of what it means to live and care."" --Emilie Pine, author of Notes to Self ""A Little Give is one of those books that reorients our sense of how society is ordered. Its interlinked pieces take another look at those human tasks traditionally designated as ""women's work"" and recasts them as profound and essential acts of labor and love."" --Geordie Williamson, The Australian ""Acerbic and tender all at once, A Little Give voices the unspeakable tangle of feelings that assail women in middle age. I can think of few writers so astute and exact as Marina Benjamin."" --Katherine May, author of Wintering ""Marina Benjamin can take the everyday ... and transform it into deeply affecting prose."" --Francesca Brown, Stylist ""With its unfailing attentiveness to the sensory and emotional textures of everyday life, Marina Benjamin's beautiful writing feels like a model of good care. A wry, absorbing, and very moving book."" --Josh Cohen, author of How To Live. What To Do. ""We all know the existential funk that housework can incite, women more so than men as they have traditionally carried the load. Not to mention the mixed emotions that go with caring for others. Marina Benjamin ruminates on the historical and societal pressures, constraints and value of this work through the lens of her own Iraqi-Jewish family--her dynamic, frustrated mother who drummed into her that ""women were put on this planet to please"" and her creative father who didn't question that being looked after was his due. No simple solutions are offered. Instead, she rewardingly riffs on the visceral push and pull of this work."" --Cameron Woodhead, The Sydney Morning Herald ""[An] exquisite book ... Benjamin's essays investigate the social and philosophical dimensions of housework, tracing the fine filaments that bind women to a system of gender inequality ... It zigzags between memory, discovery and reflection, taking the reader to the heart of the essay form. It is a journeying style of writing that constantly drives at its ideas without needing to be sure of their endpoints; it expects a question, not an answer."" --Camilla Nelson, The Conversation ""Energetic and thought-provoking."" --Vicki Renner, ArtsHub ""It's a book you can sink into and return to, for the wisdom of its reflection and the beauty of its sentences."" --Jo Case, InDaily ""A wonderful memoir by one of my favorite contemporary writers and thinkers."" -- Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance and Signal Fires ""Benjamin's overriding mission ... is to render the invisible visible ... As I read A Little Give, my thoughts kept returning to the performance art projects carried out by Mierle Laderman Ukeles throughout the 1970s. In one, she shook hands with 8,500 sanitation workers, thanking them for ""keeping New York City alive"". In another, she washed the steps at the entrance to the Wadsworth Atheneum museum in Hartford, Connecticut, rendering visible the work of low-paid custodial staff. Her point was that maintenance is undervalued. Benjamin's thoughtful book demonstrates the many ways in which it still is."" --Amy Walters, The Canberra Times ""[A] warm, engaging work, no matter the reader's gender."" --Red Tape ""Elegant and elegiac."" -- Shyamantha Asokan, workingmum.co.uk Praise for Insomnia: Named a Best Book of the Year by BuzzFeed An American Booksellers Association Indie Next Pick ""A short, ludic book about long white nights ... [Benjamin] writes feelingly about the frustrations of being awake when you don't want to be ... Her moans about her futile thought-loops alternate with flattering descriptions of her radiant nocturnal consciousness."" --The New Yorker ""Velvety ruminations on night wakefulness ... Benjamin's mind works like a wide-roving trawler that rakes an area repeatedly before moving on to adjacent territory ... Insomnia turns out to be somewhat of a celebration of sleeplessness as well as a lament ... and is filled with memorable images."" --Heller McAlpin, NPR ""[A] slim, thoughtful book."" --Ron Charles, The Washington Post ""Elegant, provocative ... In Benjamin's writing, it becomes clear that the mysteriousness of the night, its blurred boundaries, its endlessly subtle tonal variations, is a precious space, particularly for those of us who do not naturally fare well in the harsh light of the sun. Better, then, to stay in the gentle glow of the moon, beneath the hot, infinite sparks of the stars above, and set our own schedules, make up our own rules, in accordance with who we want to be, not who we're told we must become."" --Kristin Iversen, NYLON ""A svelte work of nonfiction that bridges memoir and the history of sleeplessness ... Benjamin has written three other memoirs and she knows her way around the form, drawing out personal details and reminiscences and connecting them to a larger history of sleep and its discontents ... She pings between mythological stories of sleepers and gods of sleep, dreamers and insomniacs, as well as cultural and literary approaches to sleeplessness. Like a night-ride through an insomniac's mind, Benjamin's book moves from thought to thought, driven by tangential linkages rather than logical progression ... But the writing itself is so luminous that you hardly notice ... It's writing like this, effortless as a sleeping dog, that carries you through Insomnia, the kind of book for those late hours of the night, keeping you company when you're most alone."" --Colin Dickey, Los Angeles Times ""Benjamin's impassioned and elegant memoir is not just an intimate account of a disorder for which there is still no straightforward cure, but a defiant celebration of its paradoxical potential ... Her key idea, approached via detours into history, philosophy and art, is that the inability to sleep is not just a symptom of an underlying pathology but an existential experience that can give us fresh insights into the nature of creativity and love."" --Elizabeth Lowry, The Guardian ""An insomniac's ideal sleep aid--and that's a compliment. With her collage of ruminations about sleeplessness, [Benjamin] promises no real cure ... What she offers instead is a rare kind of companionship ... Her slim book is what the doctor ordered."" --The Atlantic ""A short book of short meditations and explorations of sleeplessness and its discontents from a well-read writer. Buy two and put one in the guest room!"" --Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ""Benjamin's prose is poetic and punchy ... Insomnia offers a new way of looking at an old disorder"" --Winnipeg Free Press ""Poetic and insightful, profound and magical, personal and universal, Benjamin nails insomnia in short paragraphs and extended passages ... This memoir is not an organized narrative that leads to a cure, but rather an honest voice of one who suffers in the dark without sleep."" --Heidi Simmons, Coachella Valley Weekly ""Benjamin's technique has a nocturnal cast, her night thoughts following their own strange logic, bleeding into one another ... As Benjamin depicts the experience, the insomniac exists in a liminal state, poised between sleep and waking, light and darkness. She vividly evokes this neither-here-nor-there situation, with its heightened sensitivity to ambient light and sounds ... If we can learn to be sensible to these liminal states in which thought refuses to follow a linear path, Benjamin suggests, then we can free ourselves from entrenched ways of thinking and open up new possibilities ... Benjamin boldly points the way toward new and productive ways of living."" --Andrew Schenker, Los Angeles Review of Books ""Insomnia reads like insomnia feels--fluid prose, streaming through Marina Benjamin's experience of sleeplessness, weaving in insights from literature, art, philosophy, and psychology. It's an ethereal but profound exploration of our relationship with sleep and darkness, and especially of women's relationship to sleep--why we're drawn to cultural depictions of women in deep sleep, what keeps them awake. Benjamin's connections are lucid and illuminating, and joining her through them feels like sharing a quiet late-night conversation"" --Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed ""In sensitive, incantatory prose, Benjamin recounts her lifelong experience with sleeplessness, a cruel effect of the mind's inability to let the body go ... Flip to any page of Insomnia. Slip into the current of Benjamin's wandering thoughts. Stay with her through the night. The memoir, structured like a lengthy, meandering essay, is full of pleasing detours ... We stay by Benjamin's side to attend to our own mysteries, our own glimmering darkness"" --Rajat Singh, The Rumpus ""Benjamin's late-night ruminations on the power of sleeplessness, and specifically the relationship women have long had with sleep, are thoughtful and poetic. Benjamin's words will both captivate you and, somehow, allow you to rest easier."" --Samantha Zabell, Apartment Therapy ""Marina Benjamin's slim book exploring insomnia offers an odd yet captivating journey through the nature of sleep."" --Frannie Jackson, Paste ""Intense, vagrant, and personal ... Richly stocked with literary references to lack of sleep, its pains and occasional pleasures ... A book that attempts stylistically to sound like its subject: fragmented, digressive, at times delirious ... Benjamin gives us the essayistic equivalent of a dead-of-night drift into wakefulness and then beyond into worry, fantasy, and invention. Insomnia ought to be read not as self-help, but as an addition to that venerable philosophic genre, the consolation. It might keep you awake, but in solacing and inquiring company."" --Brian Dillon, 4Columns ""Marina Benjamin confronts insomnia, a sleep disorder that is on the rise. Through her personal experience with insomnia, Benjamin details that it can be used for good, as a a vessel for creativity. That when we can't sleep we are granted valuable insight 'into the unconscious mind.' Interestingly, Insomnia brings attention to the relationship between women and sleep, from Penelope weaving for Odysseus to the stresses that keep modern women awake each night."" --Women.com ""Wakefulness, insomnia's antithesis, aptly describes the book's gestures and rhythm. Brief paragraphs, separated by pauses, act as voltages of insight between blank spaces. Throughout the narrative, Benjamin interrogates the ancient mystery behind insomnia, reserving judgment about the possibilities of renewal from what might be considered a curse ... Insomnia is ultimately a book about the contradictions that permeate our natures. Having enjoyed it and been edified, I will look differently upon a sleepless night and will invite the light that stubbornly refuses to diminish while illuminating the darkness."" --Judith Harris, On the Seawall ""Marina Benjamin's Insomnia is more than a memoir; the book haunts with its journeys into what unsettles us in the night."" --Largehearted Boy ""A capacious, lyrical meditation on her elusive quest for sleep ... A vivid portrayal of wakefulness that will strike a chord of recognition in many readers."" --Kirkus Reviews ""A beautiful blend of material, written in short sections that are artfully woven together. Fellow insomniacs will be particularly drawn to this book, but really it's a book for anyone who likes beautiful, idea-driven prose. Benjamin digs deeply into the subject and asks questions and draws conclusions that feel fresh and vital."" --Rebecca Hussey, Book Riot, 1 of 5 Small-Press Books You Won't Want to Miss ""Every insomniac knows how sleeplessness warps and deforms reality. Marina Benjamin anatomizes its endless nights and red-eyed mornings, finding a sublime language for this strange state of lack. Her writing is often reminiscent of Anne Carson: beautiful, jagged, and precise."" --Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City ""An exquisite meditation on time, the dark hours, and the complexities of longtime love, Insomnia is a poetic journey into the wide-awake, generous, exciting mind of Marina Benjamin. I couldn't put it down, and my own inner world is richer for it."" --Dani Shapiro, author of Hourglass ""A sublime view of the treasures and torments to be found in wakefulness. Entertaining and existential, the brightest star in this erudite, nocturnal reverie in search of lost sleep is the beauty of the writing itself."" --Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk ""Benjamin writes beautifully. This is a graceful rumination on the 'wicked kind of trespass' that is insomnia, a work cogent and allusive as a lucid dream, a palimpsest of insights to dip into, day or night."" --Anna Funder, author of Stasiland"

"""Bold and tender, fierce and true--I loved it."" --Rachel Seiffert, author of A Boy In Winter ""Benjamin is brilliant at evoking the everyday and the unspoken, those most intimate moments that are often left out of the public idea of a life ... No one writes more movingly, or with more intellectual breadth and incisiveness, about the lived experiences of women."" --Sandra Newman, author of The Heavens ""A small book with a big heart, A Little Give re-humanizes those household chores that fall to women--cleaning, cooking, picking up after others, caring for elders, the constant emotional labor involved--and lights up the meaning of dailiness."" -- Beth Macy, author of Dopesick and Raising Lazarus ""Brave and curious, an examination of what it means to live and care."" --Emilie Pine, author of Notes to Self ""A Little Give is one of those books that reorients our sense of how society is ordered. Its interlinked pieces take another look at those human tasks traditionally designated as ""women's work"" and recasts them as profound and essential acts of labor and love."" --Geordie Williamson, The Australian""Acerbic and tender all at once, A Little Give voices the unspeakable tangle of feelings that assail women in middle age. I can think of few writers so astute and exact as Marina Benjamin."" --Katherine May, author of Wintering ""Marina Benjamin can take the everyday ... and transform it into deeply affecting prose."" --Francesca Brown, Stylist ""With its unfailing attentiveness to the sensory and emotional textures of everyday life, Marina Benjamin's beautiful writing feels like a model of good care. A wry, absorbing, and very moving book."" --Josh Cohen, author of How To Live. What To Do ""Marina Benjamin's powerful, poetic essays reaffirm the vital role of women's work in building homes, lives, and worlds. Essential reading in these culturally fractious times."" -- Silvia Federici ""We all know the existential funk that housework can incite, women more so than men as they have traditionally carried the load. Not to mention the mixed emotions that go with caring for others. Marina Benjamin ruminates on the historical and societal pressures, constraints and value of this work through the lens of her own Iraqi-Jewish family--her dynamic, frustrated mother who drummed into her that ""women were put on this planet to please"" and her creative father who didn't question that being looked after was his due. No simple solutions are offered. Instead, she rewardingly riffs on the visceral push and pull of this work."" --Cameron Woodhead, The Sydney Morning Herald ""[An] exquisite book ... Benjamin's essays investigate the social and philosophical dimensions of housework, tracing the fine filaments that bind women to a system of gender inequality ... It zigzags between memory, discovery and reflection, taking the reader to the heart of the essay form. It is a journeying style of writing that constantly drives at its ideas without needing to be sure of their endpoints; it expects a question, not an answer."" --Camilla Nelson, The Conversation ""Energetic and thought-provoking."" --Vicki Renner, ArtsHub ""It's a book you can sink into and return to, for the wisdom of its reflection and the beauty of its sentences."" --Jo Case, InDaily ""A wonderful memoir by one of my favorite contemporary writers and thinkers."" -- Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance and Signal Fires ""Benjamin's overriding mission ... is to render the invisible visible ... As I read A Little Give, my thoughts kept returning to the performance art projects carried out by Mierle Laderman Ukeles throughout the 1970s. In one, she shook hands with 8,500 sanitation workers, thanking them for ""keeping New York City alive"". In another, she washed the steps at the entrance to the Wadsworth Atheneum museum in Hartford, Connecticut, rendering visible the work of low-paid custodial staff. Her point was that maintenance is undervalued. Benjamin's thoughtful book demonstrates the many ways in which it still is."" --Amy Walters, The Canberra Times ""Stunning ... I inhaled this book."" -- Sam Baker, The Shift podcast ""Any one of these beautifully written and enlightening essays could have been a book in itself."" -- Catherine Taylor, Brixton Review of Books ""[A] warm, engaging work, no matter the reader's gender."" --Red Tape ""Elegant and elegiac."" --Shyamantha Asokan, workingmum.co.uk ""Personal and lyrical."" --The Irish Times Praise for Insomnia: Named a Best Book of the Year by BuzzFeed An American Booksellers Association Indie Next Pick ""A short, ludic book about long white nights ... [Benjamin] writes feelingly about the frustrations of being awake when you don't want to be ... Her moans about her futile thought-loops alternate with flattering descriptions of her radiant nocturnal consciousness."" --The New Yorker ""Velvety ruminations on night wakefulness ... Benjamin's mind works like a wide-roving trawler that rakes an area repeatedly before moving on to adjacent territory ... Insomnia turns out to be somewhat of a celebration of sleeplessness as well as a lament ... and is filled with memorable images."" --Heller McAlpin, NPR ""[A] slim, thoughtful book."" --Ron Charles, The Washington Post ""Elegant, provocative ... In Benjamin's writing, it becomes clear that the mysteriousness of the night, its blurred boundaries, its endlessly subtle tonal variations, is a precious space, particularly for those of us who do not naturally fare well in the harsh light of the sun. Better, then, to stay in the gentle glow of the moon, beneath the hot, infinite sparks of the stars above, and set our own schedules, make up our own rules, in accordance with who we want to be, not who we're told we must become."" --Kristin Iversen, NYLON ""A svelte work of nonfiction that bridges memoir and the history of sleeplessness ... Benjamin has written three other memoirs and she knows her way around the form, drawing out personal details and reminiscences and connecting them to a larger history of sleep and its discontents ... She pings between mythological stories of sleepers and gods of sleep, dreamers and insomniacs, as well as cultural and literary approaches to sleeplessness. Like a night-ride through an insomniac's mind, Benjamin's book moves from thought to thought, driven by tangential linkages rather than logical progression ... But the writing itself is so luminous that you hardly notice ... It's writing like this, effortless as a sleeping dog, that carries you through Insomnia, the kind of book for those late hours of the night, keeping you company when you're most alone."" --Colin Dickey, Los Angeles Times ""Benjamin's impassioned and elegant memoir is not just an intimate account of a disorder for which there is still no straightforward cure, but a defiant celebration of its paradoxical potential ... Her key idea, approached via detours into history, philosophy and art, is that the inability to sleep is not just a symptom of an underlying pathology but an existential experience that can give us fresh insights into the nature of creativity and love."" --Elizabeth Lowry, The Guardian ""An insomniac's ideal sleep aid--and that's a compliment. With her collage of ruminations about sleeplessness, [Benjamin] promises no real cure ... What she offers instead is a rare kind of companionship ... Her slim book is what the doctor ordered."" --The Atlantic ""A short book of short meditations and explorations of sleeplessness and its discontents from a well-read writer. Buy two and put one in the guest room!"" --Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ""Benjamin's prose is poetic and punchy ... Insomnia offers a new way of looking at an old disorder"" --Winnipeg Free Press ""Poetic and insightful, profound and magical, personal and universal, Benjamin nails insomnia in short paragraphs and extended passages ... This memoir is not an organized narrative that leads to a cure, but rather an honest voice of one who suffers in the dark without sleep."" --Heidi Simmons, Coachella Valley Weekly ""Benjamin's technique has a nocturnal cast, her night thoughts following their own strange logic, bleeding into one another ... As Benjamin depicts the experience, the insomniac exists in a liminal state, poised between sleep and waking, light and darkness. She vividly evokes this neither-here-nor-there situation, with its heightened sensitivity to ambient light and sounds ... If we can learn to be sensible to these liminal states in which thought refuses to follow a linear path, Benjamin suggests, then we can free ourselves from entrenched ways of thinking and open up new possibilities ... Benjamin boldly points the way toward new and productive ways of living."" --Andrew Schenker, Los Angeles Review of Books ""Insomnia reads like insomnia feels--fluid prose, streaming through Marina Benjamin's experience of sleeplessness, weaving in insights from literature, art, philosophy, and psychology. It's an ethereal but profound exploration of our relationship with sleep and darkness, and especially of women's relationship to sleep--why we're drawn to cultural depictions of women in deep sleep, what keeps them awake. Benjamin's connections are lucid and illuminating, and joining her through them feels like sharing a quiet late-night conversation"" --Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed ""In sensitive, incantatory prose, Benjamin recounts her lifelong experience with sleeplessness, a cruel effect of the mind's inability to let the body go ... Flip to any page of Insomnia. Slip into the current of Benjamin's wandering thoughts. Stay with her through the night. The memoir, structured like a lengthy, meandering essay, is full of pleasing detours ... We stay by Benjamin's side to attend to our own mysteries, our own glimmering darkness"" --Rajat Singh, The Rumpus ""Benjamin's late-night ruminations on the power of sleeplessness, and specifically the relationship women have long had with sleep, are thoughtful and poetic. Benjamin's words will both captivate you and, somehow, allow you to rest easier."" --Samantha Zabell, Apartment Therapy ""Marina Benjamin's slim book exploring insomnia offers an odd yet captivating journey through the nature of sleep."" --Frannie Jackson, Paste ""Intense, vagrant, and personal ... Richly stocked with literary references to lack of sleep, its pains and occasional pleasures ... A book that attempts stylistically to sound like its subject: fragmented, digressive, at times delirious ... Benjamin gives us the essayistic equivalent of a dead-of-night drift into wakefulness and then beyond into worry, fantasy, and invention. Insomnia ought to be read not as self-help, but as an addition to that venerable philosophic genre, the consolation. It might keep you awake, but in solacing and inquiring company."" --Brian Dillon, 4Columns ""Marina Benjamin confronts insomnia, a sleep disorder that is on the rise. Through her personal experience with insomnia, Benjamin details that it can be used for good, as a a vessel for creativity. That when we can't sleep we are granted valuable insight 'into the unconscious mind.' Interestingly, Insomnia brings attention to the relationship between women and sleep, from Penelope weaving for Odysseus to the stresses that keep modern women awake each night."" --Women.com ""Wakefulness, insomnia's antithesis, aptly describes the book's gestures and rhythm. Brief paragraphs, separated by pauses, act as voltages of insight between blank spaces. Throughout the narrative, Benjamin interrogates the ancient mystery behind insomnia, reserving judgment about the possibilities of renewal from what might be considered a curse ... Insomnia is ultimately a book about the contradictions that permeate our natures. Having enjoyed it and been edified, I will look differently upon a sleepless night and will invite the light that stubbornly refuses to diminish while illuminating the darkness."" --Judith Harris, On the Seawall ""Marina Benjamin's Insomnia is more than a memoir; the book haunts with its journeys into what unsettles us in the night."" --Largehearted Boy ""A capacious, lyrical meditation on her elusive quest for sleep ... A vivid portrayal of wakefulness that will strike a chord of recognition in many readers."" --Kirkus Reviews ""A beautiful blend of material, written in short sections that are artfully woven together. Fellow insomniacs will be particularly drawn to this book, but really it's a book for anyone who likes beautiful, idea-driven prose. Benjamin digs deeply into the subject and asks questions and draws conclusions that feel fresh and vital."" --Rebecca Hussey, Book Riot, 1 of 5 Small-Press Books You Won't Want to Miss ""Every insomniac knows how sleeplessness warps and deforms reality. Marina Benjamin anatomizes its endless nights and red-eyed mornings, finding a sublime language for this strange state of lack. Her writing is often reminiscent of Anne Carson: beautiful, jagged, and precise."" --Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City ""An exquisite meditation on time, the dark hours, and the complexities of longtime love, Insomnia is a poetic journey into the wide-awake, generous, exciting mind of Marina Benjamin. I couldn't put it down, and my own inner world is richer for it."" --Dani Shapiro, author of Hourglass ""A sublime view of the treasures and torments to be found in wakefulness. Entertaining and existential, the brightest star in this erudite, nocturnal reverie in search of lost sleep is the beauty of the writing itself."" --Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk ""Benjamin writes beautifully. This is a graceful rumination on the 'wicked kind of trespass' that is insomnia, a work cogent and allusive as a lucid dream, a palimpsest of insights to dip into, day or night."" --Anna Funder, author of Stasiland"

Bold and tender, fierce and true--I loved it. --Rachel Seiffert, author of A Boy In Winter Benjamin is brilliant at evoking the everyday and the unspoken, those most intimate moments that are often left out of the public idea of a life ... No one writes more movingly, or with more intellectual breadth and incisiveness, about the lived experiences of women. --Sandra Newman, author of The Heavens A Little Give is one of those books that reorients our sense of how society is ordered. Its interlinked pieces take another look at those human tasks traditionally designated as women's work and recasts them as profound and essential acts of labor and love. --Geordie Williamson, The Australian Acerbic and tender all at once, A Little Give voices the unspeakable tangle of feelings that assail women in middle age. I can think of few writers so astute and exact as Marina Benjamin. --Katherine May, author of Wintering Marina Benjamin can take the everyday ... and transform it into deeply affecting prose. --Francesca Brown, Stylist With its unfailing attentiveness to the sensory and emotional textures of everyday life, Marina Benjamin's beautiful writing feels like a model of good care. A wry, absorbing, and very moving book. -- Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus Praise for Insomnia: A darkly thrilling beauty of a book ... Benjamin's talent is Arachne-like. The materials she integrates are eclectic, and the resulting constructed web of her thoughts is architecturally robust and resplendent with dazzling prose. --Tali Lavi, Australian Book Review A short, ludic book about long white nights ... [Benjamin] writes feelingly about the frustrations of being awake when you don't want to be ... Her moans about her futile thought-loops alternate with flattering descriptions of her radiant nocturnal consciousness. --Zoe Heller, The New Yorker Praise for Insomnia: Lucid and sophisticated ... A restrained but wonderful guide to the convulsive changes of 50 and over ... This is a book that yields valuable insights on almost every page. --Melissa Benn, The Guardian

Author Information

Marina Benjamin's most recent books are Insomnia, The Middlepause, Rocket Dreams, shortlisted for the Eugene Emme Award, and Last Days in Babylon, longlisted for the Wingate Prize. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and the digital magazines Literary Hub and Aeon, where she is a senior editor. She lives in London.

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