How to use this Page

Gerard Donovan, author of Julius Winsome and Schopenhauer's Telescope, offers a bold and chilling statement on drugs, dealers, doctors, and the American condition in his new novel Sunless.


"The next morning, when I was getting my mother her morning dose, I slipped another pill into my mouth to layer the first, to keep the momentum going. I did that for a few days as each day crossed namelessly into the next. Could have been days, could have been weeks. The pills kept me pressed down and out of any place. Sometimes my mind seemed attached to my brain at the end of a string. I was on one side of the room, what I felt was the other side of the room, this is what I mean. Under a heap of blankets I waited for the shadows and lights that filled my dreams. One night I opened the windows wide to stay awake and the room filled with a white pale light from the salt and lit my lungs. I burned a candle and put it on the window sill to warm my face while I watched the dark. To anyone driving past I'd look like a spirit, a face in a long night with no body.

If they knew me they might say, That's Jimmy, he has no body. He puts himself at the window to be seen, even in a dream."

Two new offerings from Gerard Donovan this month: the critically acclaimed and deeply beloved Julius Winsome in paperback, and Sunless, a new novel (from which we will hear much more on The Winged Elephant) that Mr. Donovan has revised and rewritten from an earlier incarnation published in the UK as Doctor Salt. Looking ahead to 2008, Overlook will publish a stunning collection of Gerard Donovan's short stories, Young Irelanders, about his native and not-always-green Emerald Isle.