{"product_id":"suburban-death-project","title":"Suburban Death Project","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe twelve stories comprising \u003cem\u003eSuburban Death Project\u003c\/em\u003e sparkle with disturbing brilliance, revealing in full why Aimee Parkison is so widely celebrated for her innovative narratives and experimental fiction. \u003cem\u003eSuburban Death Projec\u003c\/em\u003et breathes life into what is barely surviving: ill-fated families, frightening relationships, and dangerous loves. With a dark humor serving to make unimaginable traumas both tolerable and knowable, Parkison delves into marriage and mourning, lust and loss, and violence and its aftermath. She exposes the horrors of life in its bodily form and relieves them with a passionate wonder burning so brightly it outshines age, death, and family secrets. In average American households, families haunt each other while still alive as they recompose into dragonflies, peach trees, squirrels, ducks, owls, shadows, tunnels, and zoos of endangered species. Pinned to boards for study, peered at by voyeurs, videoed by neighbors, or vivisected for the greater good, each body in these riveting stories ergoes an unflinching examination.\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAimee Parkison\u003c\/strong\u003e is widely published and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including: the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize; the Kurt Vonnegut Prize from \u003cem\u003eNorth American Review\u003c\/em\u003e; the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction; a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, a Puffin Foundation Fellowship, and a William Randolph Hearst Creative Artists Fellowship. She currently teaches creative writing and literature in the MFA\/PhD program at Oklahoma State University.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Readers should savor these marvelous stories, as they are sadly over too soon. Extraordinary, character-driven tales from a sublime voice that resonates.\" - \u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The Gothic tales that constitute Aimee Parkison's \u003cem\u003eSuburban Death Project\u003c\/em\u003e tend to occur in rural settings with woods and water, which contribute to the nightmarish afflictions that torment her characters. The afflictions' unexpectedness, along with the subject matter and deceptive sangfroid of the prose, resemble that master of the uncanny, Patricia Highsmith. High praise.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eHarold Jaffe\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In Aimee Parkison's \u003cem\u003eSuburban Death Project\u003c\/em\u003e, mysteries abound: insect actors, the DNA of extinct animals preserved in tattoos, a dildo in lapis lazuli, and, above it all, the mystery of just what brave new world of storytelling is this? Playful and effortlessly pleasurable, Parkison's Project is also powerfully human.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eCurtis White\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Parkison is a master of the densely coiled secrets that run rampant within the body\/couple\/suburb\/structure. Nothing is left unmined through this explosive collection packed with subterfuge of gaslighting, stalking and what keeps the game of predator\/prey interesting and provocative. \u003cem\u003eSuburban Death Project\u003c\/em\u003e scrapes the nerves and pierces the heart. Parkison detonates and mesmerizes.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eMeg Tuite\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Stephen Dunn once argued that 'the good poem maintains a delicate balance between strangeness and familiarity,' that it 'must make the familiar strange enough to be re-seen or re-felt by the reader.' In that sense—as well as in the lyricism of her exacting sentences—the stories in \u003cem\u003eSuburban Death Project\u003c\/em\u003e are poems... These compelling and memorable fictions will surprise you, and, yes, disturb you, but they will also move you, and reawaken you to the strangeness of the familiar world, and in so doing they will allow you to return to it as if for the first time, as if it were once again a garden.\" -\u003cstrong\u003e George Looney\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Who owns the body? Who owns the self? Who can measure the unfathomable future and can we trust them to tell their findings true? In Parkison's superb new collection, women escape their childhoods by succumbing to their magic; or mourn their husbands by tasting the fruit that grows from their bodies; or claim their destiny by abandoning it to the world. These are stories of blood—almost written in it—but they are rarely stories of violence even when violent acts occur. Rather, Parkison's wives and daughters, ghosts and surgeons, widows, witnesses, lovers of the night and the deep, dark waters imbue these tales with blood that pulses even as it spills. These are terrible tales that echo like prophecy as they underline, again and again, the inescapably beautiful now. Reader, beware, here the map ends.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eSarah Blackman\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Itasca Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54526361338131,"sku":"9780991378043","price":27.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0948\/3521\/2563\/files\/9780991378043ita.jpg?v=1785851641","url":"https:\/\/danuc.net\/products\/suburban-death-project","provider":"Danu's Wardrobe","version":"1.0","type":"link"}