{"product_id":"double-check-for-sleeping-children-stories-9781573662062","title":"Double-Check for Sleeping Children: Stories","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, Double-Check for Sleeping Children is the newest work by award-winning writer Kirstin Allio\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e At once formal and tidal, damning and dreaming, Kirstin Allio's \u003ci\u003eDouble-Check for Sleeping Children\u003c\/i\u003e is charged with prayer, curse, redemption and abasement. Does truth come from reason, or beauty, or suffering? It takes the inner lives of outsiders, dark mirrors, and false ceilings to find an answer. \u003cp\u003eFamilies split by social class, a wealthy young widow, addicts, hunters, poor whites, a green card bride and a nursing mother: in twenty poetically and morally propulsive short stories, Allio disquiets the sublimated and palpates shadows. She leads us through the sometimes flooded, other times flood-lit halls of the human soul.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003ePart menacing, macabre Mary Gaitskill, part Denis Johnson in \u003ci\u003eJesus' Son\u003c\/i\u003e, and with the taut, wry, tell-all detail of Elizabeth Hardwick, \u003ci\u003eDouble-Check for Sleeping Children\u003c\/i\u003e deals in codedness and transgression. The stories explore coming of age in middle age, anxiety about time and technology, inverted revelation. \"What was I supposed to do with Basho and Mosie?\" Sheila asks herself about her children in \"Uncollected Territories.\" \"Be my real self? Hand myself over, do what you will with me, plant your strange selves in my private soil?\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eKIRSTIN ALLIO\u003c\/b\u003e is author of \u003ci\u003eGarner\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBuddhism for Western Children\u003c\/i\u003e, and her first story collection \u003ci\u003eClothed, Female Figure \u003c\/i\u003eis a winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Competition. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"University of Alabama Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50903718166802,"sku":"9781573662062","price":13.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_de90aa39-3361-466d-bf10-3d0c6f6846e7.jpg?v=1738504541","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/double-check-for-sleeping-children-stories-9781573662062","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}