THE SLIP

Audacious and brilliant debut novel - reminiscent of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, The Slip is a brilliant and sprawling novel that captivates, charms and surprises the reader from the beginning.

Set in Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym in Austin, Texas and spanning the from the 1990s to today, the novel starts with the mystery of a teenage boy's disappearance in 1998 that quickly encircles a wide cast of colorful characters who are all connected to the boy's strange disappearance.

As the novel unfolds, these characters - a phone sex operator, a future prize-fighter smuggled across the border dressed as a clown, a lascivious nursing home aide, an opportunistic twin and his down-on-his-luck brother, and a slew of early morning pugilists - all go through great transformations as they grapple with notions of identity, change, and the ever-shifting canvas of America.

Nothing is static here, from the characters (who shift personas, trade places, even change races) to the setting (a city that has doubled in population every 25 years since the Civil War) to the structure of the novel itself. It's big in size and scope, spanning the decades from the 1990s to today, with quick detours into the past and the future.
Reminiscent of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, The Slip is a brilliant and sprawling novel that captivates, charms and surprises the reader from the beginning.

Lucas Schaefer has had short fiction in One Story, The Baffler, Southwest Review, CRAFT and The Florida Review, and essays in Slate and Off Assignment. He was a writer-in-residence at the Corsicana Artists & Writers Residency, where he received a GW Jackson Multicultural Society grant, and he has an MFA from the New Writers Project at UT-Austin.