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Hardcover Book Details
  • 02/2021
  • 9780578613840
  • 215 pages
  • $45.00
Sleeping Presidents

Adult; General Fiction (including literary and historical); (Market)

Sleeping Presidents takes us inside the minds and dreams of the 45 men who have served the nation as President of the United States. This work of historical fiction was inspired by Walt Whitman’s poem, The Dreamers. Using the artist’s distinctive paintings and original prose, each chapter is devoted to a former president and features artwork not previously exhibited. Sleeping Presidents  explores the gulf between what we allow to be seen publicly and what we may be desperate to conceal, even from ourselves. Blurring the personal and political, these sympathetic, candid and amusing vignettes give witness to the private rites of public personae.
Reviews
Phillips’s (Ransoming Mathew Brady) slim prose fiction collection takes us into the dreams and daydreams of 45 American presidents, up through Donald Trump. Inspired by Walt Whitman’s poem “The Sleepers,” Sleeping Presidents unfolds with a dreamy, poetic quality of its own, these first-person accounts of dreams often emphasizing beds and sleep, keeping readers off balance and guessing at what is real, what is being dreamed up, and what is the author’s invention. Phillips’s own impressionistic watercolor and oil paintings mirror the chimerical prose and central theme that we can never really know anyone, perhaps especially our public figures.

As with all collections, some pieces stand out. Phillips is most successful when he inserts specific details into the worlds these men inhabit. Reagan remembers how “Mother” (whose lap is “a bony refuge”) “changes her apron daily, so I can tell the day of the week from the colors and smells,” and Arthur describes a medicinal concoction for baldness consisting of “pulverized snails, horse leeches, and salt.” Phillips’s presidents tend to ruminate about similar matters—their childhood, their parents, the functioning of their bodies and, occasionally, the presidency. While certain chapters boast stylistic differences, such as Obama’s use of poetry, this makes the less inspired stories feel repetitive. The pieces are cohesive, of course, as each one deals with a president and demonstrates a shared and even mundane humanity (“I like being president,” Trump muses. “It’s not a job so much as a feeling”) though the stream-of-consciousness approach makes some entries feel less memorably focused than others.

This style does have the advantage of creating intimacy between the reader and each president–where else are we going to read about President Cleveland’s scrotum or Garfield’s shaved legs? The paintings, meanwhile, offer a stunning complement to the prose, inviting readers to make the kind of intuitive connections and leaps they might while dreaming. Overall, this is an unorthodox but captivating approach to historical fiction, and the embedded art elevates this to something quite special.

Takeaway: A winning, experimental plunge into the dreaming minds of American presidents.

Great for fans of: Thomas Mallon, George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo.

Production grades
Cover: A+
Design and typography: A+
Illustrations: A+
Editing: B
Marketing copy: A

Formats
Hardcover Book Details
  • 02/2021
  • 9780578613840
  • 215 pages
  • $45.00
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