Sleep Decades — Malarkey Books, 2024 

"My sense is that Sleep Decades will be regarded one day as the memorable debut of its celebrated and important author. As in Dahlberg, the writing achieves its convulsive effects from a sonorous baroque style set against the low life, in this case the milieu of teenagers, receptionists, activists, beach partiers, and potheads, among others. As in Cortázar, its heart lies firmly in sympathy with the unwieldy passions of young people. And as in Carpentier, its erudition is daunting, but relieved by a streak of mordant humor and classical form."

―Alvin Lu, author of The Hell Screens

"Bonilla writes an exquisite and sonorous prose, Victorian in its resonance and haunting in its effect upon the reader. One strength of these stories rests upon the dialectic between the often low station of the characters and their circumstances and the careful, exacting style that eschews any lingering attachment to mere realism by foregrounding its artifice and historical antecedents. This is not a book of comforts; it is written, as the jacket copy tells us, ‘in the adversative mood’, and yet these stories are not devoid of hope, although perhaps they, once again like Empedocles in Arnold’s poem, would beseech us to curb any unjustified extravagance."

―Eric Racher, Exacting Clam 

"Sleep Decades is exuberant without bouncing off the walls, and Bonilla throws highbrow cultivation around himself like hoops. He skillfully takes us along on the long-distance haul of meaning, even if the ride gets a little purple at times. Sometimes his sentences rise off the page and wave their lives right before our eyes, sometimes they act like they suffer from a rare neurological disorder." 

―Hugh Blanton, Your Impossible Voice