Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Slipping

Slipping by Lauren Beukes
Tachyon Publications: 11/29/16
eBook review copy; 288 pages
ISBN-13: 9781616962401

Slipping: Stories, Essays, & Other Writing by Lauren Beukes is a highly recommended collection of 26 previously published pieces. The majority are fiction, with five nonfiction essays at the end of the collection. As with any compilation, some of the works appealed to me and felt more successful than others, but there is no selected work included that doesn't belong. There are several selections that could easily be the start of a novel. My absolute top favorites were Slipping, Smileys, The Green, and Litmash, but there are several others I also liked quite a bit. All the works are, to some extent, about the darkness inside people's souls. They are all well-written and powerful.

Contents include:
Fiction: Muse; Slipping; Confirm/Ignore; Branded; Smileys; Princess; My Insect Skin; Parking; Pop Tarts; The Green; Litmash; Easy Touch; Alegbra; Unathi Battles the Black Hairballs; Dear Mariana; Riding with the Dream Patrol; Unaccounted; Tankwa-Karoo; Exhibitionist; Dial Tone; Ghost Girl
Nonfiction: Adventures in Journalism; All the Pretty Corpses; Judging Unity; Inner City; On Beauty: A Letter to My Fiver-Year-Old Daughter
To assist those who need it, there is a Glossary which could help those who need it with some of the South African words in the collection

Disclosure: My advanced reading copy was courtesy of the publisher/author.

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