{"product_id":"my-childhood-in-pieces-a-stand-up-comedy-a-skokie-elegy","title":"My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy","description":"\u003cp\u003eFrom the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of an aspiring middle-class Jewish family whose hard-boiled American values and wit were the forge of a poet's coming-of-age.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water. . . . They didn’t expect an entire book,” Hirsch says in the “prologue” to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In microchapters—sometimes only a single scathing sentence long—with titles like “Call to Breakfast,” “Pay Cash,” “The Sorrow of Manly Sports,” and “Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue,” Eddie’s gambling father, Ruby, son of a white metal smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddie’s mom bangs pots to wake the kids to a breakfast of cold cereal; Uncle Bob, in the collection business, is heard threatening people on the phone; and nobody suffers fools. In this household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and cross with his right, never to kid a kidder, and how to sneak out at night.\u003cbr\u003eAffectionate, deadpan, and exuberant, steeped in Yiddishkeit and Midwestern practicality, Hirsch’s laugh-and-cry performance animates a heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed with sorrow and a huge store of poetic wit.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Penguin Random House","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51580290269491,"sku":"9780593802823","price":29.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0843\/1108\/1267\/files\/9780593802823.jpg?v=1748362179","url":"https:\/\/slantoflightbooks.com\/products\/my-childhood-in-pieces-a-stand-up-comedy-a-skokie-elegy","provider":"Slant of Light Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}