BRUCE BAUMAN reads from his newest novel BROKEN SLEEP

Broken Sleep (Other Press)

Spanning 1940s to 2020s America and told with contagious vivacity, Broken Sleep knits the stories of four distinctly memorable characters into an indelible portrait of American culture that is at once sweeping, irreverent, and heartbreaking. When everyman Moses Teumer discovers that he has an aggressive form of leukemia, his search for a donor who can save him sets off a wild chain of events as he discovers that the woman who raised him is not his birth mother. Encompassing a Pynchon-esque saga of rock music, sex, drugs, art, and politics, this novel is an unforgettable examination of the secrets we keep and the risks we take in the name of commandeering our own destinies. 

After his diagnosis, Moses is led to his real mother, Salome Savant, a rebellious avant-garde artist who has spent her life in and out of a mental health facility. Salome’s son and Moses’s half-brother is Alchemy Savant, the mercurial front man of the world-renowned rock band The Insatiables. As Moses’s fate intertwines with Salome and Alchemy’s, the shocking secrets of his lineage and his Jewish identity are revealed. As Moses begins to lose his grip on the life he once thought he had, Alchemy abandons music to launch a political campaign to revolutionize 2020s America. Joining these characters is Ambitious Mindswallow, aka Ricky McFinn, who journeys from juvenile delinquency in Queens to being The Insatiables’ bassist and Alchemy’s Sancho Panza, along with an unforgettable constellation of artists, musicians, movie stars, and creatives who populate the twisted terrain of the Teumer and Savant family’s pasts and futures.

As each of Bauman’s characters comes closer to understanding their identity and the truth about their origins, the reader is gripped by this portrait of life lived to the fullest.  A colorful and provocative tale that takes the reader from Los Angeles to NYC to London to Brazil, Broken Sleep stuns with its propulsive energy and its hilarious and poignant observations about myth-making, the secrets we keep from one another, and how we come to terms with our pasts.

Praise for Broken Sleep

“Such a pleasure to plunge into this joyous kaleidoscope of a novel, a multi-voiced tumbling chorus of outrageous characters, hidden parenthood, secrets and discoveries, the gritty outré art world of the 1970s, rockers and mad visionaries and a man named Moses who just wants to live his life when illness forces him to open up the closed door of his family’s mysterious past. I haven’t seen a book with such energy and joy and sweeping delights since The World According to Garp. Bauman’s novel is a tour de force.” —Janet Fitch, author of Paint It Black and White Oleander

“Consuming multitudes of novels before it and after, Bruce Bauman’s flipbook-epic spectacularly shuffles voice and memory—a careening travelogue on psychic terrains of fate, art, sex, madness, history, philosophy, rock ’n’ roll, the personal political, and laws of identity for which no statute of limitations can exist. This is raging, inspiration-jacked literary insomnia at the deepest hour of our brilliant dreaming.” —Steve Erickson, author of These Dreams of You and Zeroville

“Broken Sleep is a stunning, original, unpredictable novel, with a mix of wild voices and riveting, driving stories.  I love all the characters… The world that Bauman imagines is chilling and vivid, and there is an abundance of wisdom throughout the book, with startling insights on every page. The novel is a brilliant success—brave, wonderfully eccentric, utterly confident and engrossing.” —Joanna Scott, author of De Potter’s Grand Tour

“Broken Sleep is an unabashedly Big Think book that refuses to be categorized. On the surface it’s a roller coaster, jetting forward with ideas/observations on everything from avant-garde art to rock ’n’ roll renown to history and philosophy. Yet beneath the surface it is also a warm-hearted exploration of the deep messiness of families. Of parents, present and absent, and their children. Of siblings and spouses and volitional families of friends and bandmates. It’s a simultaneously poignant and exhilarating ride.” —Melvin Jules Bukiet, author of After

“Broken Sleep could be considered the author’s great American retort to Stephen Dedalus’s declaration in Joyce’s Ulyssesthat ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’...Bauman’s philosophical, humorous, and compelling storytelling ponders many different riddles of exile—personal, political, artistic with an always acute eye and an unfailingly intense empathy.” —Anthony Miller, critic and author

"Bruce Bauman is one of the most engaging and engaged writers and thinkers that I know." —Rebecca Goldstein, author ofPlato at the Googleplex

Bruce Bauman is the author of the novel And the Word Was. Among his awards are a COLA (City of Los Angeles) Fellowship in Literature, a Durfee Foundation grant, and a UNESCO/Aschberg Fellowship. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Salon, BOMB, Bookforum, and numerous anthologies and literary magazines. Bauman is an instructor in the CalArts MFA Writing Program and Critical Studies Department and has been Senior Editor of Black Clock literary magazine since its inception in 2003. Born and raised in New York City, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the painter Suzan Woodruff.