A.B. West lives in Belgium, where she has worked with the avant-garde theater company, Théâtre Laboratoire Vicinal. She performed and collaborated on the original plays Tramp, Lunapark and Chaman Hooligan. She was the director and sole actress of the play "I" (with a text by Frédéric Baal, and 7 sculpture/stage-properties by Belgian sculptor Olivier Strebelle) which toured worldwide and was featured in a film by French television. It also toured for several years in the U.S., playing at the Guggenheim, the Brooklyn Academy, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, etc.

West has also been an agent, an editor with Wall Street Journal Europe, a free-lance translator and a copywriter. Wakenight Emporium has been accepted for publication in France as Figurations Lumières.

"A moody, intimate and lucid meditation on time, space and mortality, Wakenight Emporium mysteriously awakens in the reader deep, primordial, shadow longings. It is rare to experience a work of prose that inspires such wishfulness and hope, that suggests such option and possibility and at the same time such limitation. A beautiful, moving and ineffably sad book. I feel lucky to have read it."

—Carole Maso

"These thirty-one rhetorical riffs are almost literally spell-binding; West's Wakenight Emporium is a magicked work of words. Both abstract and specific, far-ranging and precisely, the voice of the speaker here dazzles---and it does so with power and wit. A startling, tentative as well as high-gloss finished product, this stay against confusion feels ambitious as well as achieved."

—Nicholas Delbanco