An anthology of sleepless nights? Just the thing, you might think, to help you doze off - but in fact this uncommonly intelligent and genuinely interesting compilation is likely to keep your eyes firmly open at any time of the day or night. Messer is the author of a novel about an insomniac bookseller who collects books with passages about sleeplessness - a nicely Borgesian explanation for the existence of the present volume, in which Borges is included ("Funes the Memorious") along with extracts from Don Quixote, letters by Marcel Proust, poems by Raymond Carver and Alexander Pushkin, extracts from Gothic novels and generous helpings of Nabokov, Chekhov and the Thousand and One Nights. A.W.