Winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2 and introduced by Matt Bell, out now, August 2024!

Double-Check at FC2

“These catalytic stories erupt from places where hurt feels like jealousy and swallowing is painful, where women wash up hard, naked and salted, wrecked on the shores of their own mysterious lives. When you awaken to the world startled and curious—exquisitely alive and afraid—the way Kirstin Allio’s people do, you’ll begin to feel every part of your body throbbing as if it has its own heart. Surrender to this magic. Double-Check for Sleeping Children will trouble and beguile you.”

—Melanie Rae Thon, author of As if Fire Could Hide Us and The Voice of the River

“Formally daring, relentlessly probing, Kirstin Allio’s writing heaves the reader into a world of predation and initiation, habit and sally. Double-Check for Sleeping Children joins the ranks of singular short story collections such as Jayne Anne Phillip’s Black Tickets and Garielle Lutz’s Stories in the Worst Way. I was floored by this book.”

—JoAnna Novak, author of Contradiction Days: An Artist on the Verge of Motherhood

“Allio is a genius of description. Her narrators paint the weather—the sun is “rotting like a lemon;” capture the crash pad—“the trunk of the toilet was cracked, and cockroaches pimped the rim;” pinpoint the time of life—“The first few years of your twenties everything in your head is in the second person;” and nail the epiphany—“with a clarity you won’t have again for decades, you understand it’s no country for women.

“Upon Googling an old friend and listening to her in an interview talking about her old life, [the narrator] says, “It wasn’t my own name I wanted to hear, but the sense of eavesdropping on my own past with someone else as the main character.” This is Allio’s gift: to be eavesdropping on the pasts we might have had, were someone else the main character of our lives. Ultimately, like the stick chart on its cover, Double-Check for Sleeping Children maps patterns, disruptions, and swells, leaving a framework of clues by which to navigate a bravely shared journey. 

http://necessaryfiction.com/reviews/double-check-for-sleeping-children/

Interview with Luke Rolfes at the Laurel Review

https://laurelreview.org/kirstin-allio

Conversation with Jeremy Griffin at the Hopkins Review

https://hopkinsreview.com/features/new-books-in-conversation-kirstin-allio-and-jeremy-griffin