The Sleep Garden explores and pushes the boundaries between fact and imagination, real and surreal, and life and the afterlife. In an underground apartment building called "the Burrow"--essentially purgatory{u2015}"twilight souls" inhabit the space between life and death. Interwoven with their stories are those of inhabitants of the living world: a retired sea captain, a psychotic former child actor (possibly the sea captain{u2019}s illegitimate son?),...

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. "My poor boy, he was too good for this earth," the president...

The classic story of a man who endures the torment of Hell and Purgatory in his quest to reach Paradise.