Praise for Sleep is Now a Foreign Country
"Daredevils interested in a bold and singular literary experiment may want to tackle this knotty mind-bender."
—Literary Review of Canada
"For all the ways Barnes’s book is indescribable, this much is true—it is a thing of beauty and courage.”
—Brain Bethune, Toronto Star
“At times memoir, at times dissociative fable, at times personal essay ... the writing maintains breath-close nearness to the perceptions of the narrator ... akin to being in a diving bell with the storyteller, extremely intimate and viscerally suffocating ... culminat[ing] in a feeling of waking from a vivid dream not quite remembered.”
—Micheline Maylor, Quill & Quire
"As riveting as it is terrifying, as mysterious as it is illuminating, Mike Barnes's Sleep is Now a Foreign Country takes us inside the claustrophobic, kaleidoscopic world of madness. Like a sedimentary rock, layers of meaning are stacked upon one another inside its slim pages, building a structure so unlike any other book that you can't put it down without being changed."
—Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
“Sleep is Now a Foreign Country is an intricately structured rendering of madness and memory, a mix of hallucination and dense, concrete realism, which only makes the phantasmagoria of illusion all the more poignant. This is an amazing work—supremely intelligent, coolly self-analytical, eerie, melancholy, revelatory and terrifying.”
—Douglas Glover, winner of the Governor-General’s Award for Elle
Praise for Mike Barnes
“Timely, lyrical, tough, accurate.”
—Margaret Atwood on Twitter
“Masterful … The Adjustment League is suspenseful, exquisitely written and—at times—corrosively funny.”
—Maclean’s
“Fiercely alive, marked by a sharp, unerring eye for detail and a wonderful way with metaphors.”
—Toronto Star
“Poetically compelling and evocative … The Lily Pond is the ultimate act of recollection.”
—Quill and Quire
