You Can Sleep While I Drive - Hardcover

In the nine stories of this, her second collection, the elusive nature of human feeling and experience continues to engage Liza Wieland's imagination, as her characters, old and young, male and female, try to define themselves against the unforgiving landscape of the American West and of their own desires. In the title story, a father travels across the country to visit his son in California who is dying of AIDS. The strange and tender meeting of father and son brings hope to both of them that this visit might heal three decades of hurt and regret. In "Salt Lake" a young woman tries to ease her invalid mother through death and at the same time comes to understand her mother's long reticence in revealing the secret of her father's identity. In "Cirque du Soleil" a San Francisco periodontist has to deal with his feelings about his elderly mother's love affair with a much younger man as he is faced with the dissolution of a love relationship of his own. In "Gray's Anatomy" three aging inventors find an unexpected haven for themselves and their gravely ill children in a beach house on the California coast. The narrator in "Laramie" asking, "Where did it go, the part of me that loved you," is not so much seeking an answer as trying to find, as all Wieland's characters do, a place of sanctity that refuses interpretation.

LIZA WIELAND was born in Chicago in 1960 and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, the setting for her award-winning first novel, "The Names of the Lost," published by SMU Press in 1992. Her first story collection, "Discovering America," was published in 1994 by Random House. She teaches Creative Writing and American Literature at California State University, Fresno.