“Await Your Reply”

Dan Chaon’s novel “Await Your Reply” contains three storylines, all concerning “manipulative creeps,” according to the Washington Post. Each story is about fleeing one identity in the hopes of finding better residence in a re-invented self. “Chaon zeroes in on the strange irony that an age so obsessed with individuality should also give rise to such fluid and ephemeral identities,” says the Washington Post. Chaon’s characters are determined but naïve, and the reader is entranced by their fumbles. “Chaon creates a world that is riveting in its distance from the ordinary, though it’s one that most of us would prefer to enter only through the pages of a book,” explains the Seattle Times. A discomforting, eerie violence lurks in Chaon’s novel, published by Ballantine Books. “Chaon is a dark, provocative writer, and ‘Await Your Reply’ is a dark, provocative book,” writes The New York Times. His literary twists and turns are impressive and his subject eternally confounding. Darkness is indivisible from Chaon’s examination of modern identity and he is not afraid to explore its depths.