The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club ― And Other Stories

A New York Times Notable Book: Darkly comic fables of modern life from a “major discovery” whose “writing gets in your bloodstream like a fever” (The Washington Post Book World).

A housewife with a ravenous lust for the adolescent boy who mows her lawn swallows him whole. A woman nonchalantly hacks off her leg at a posh private club. A father babyproofs his house so thoroughly he never sees his wife and child. And a businessman passing through an airport risks it all to save a giant lobster from death.

In these “brisk, funny, stylish, original” stories, the award-winning author of Carnivore Diet merges the mundane with the unimaginable, and peels back the squeaky-clean façade of suburbia to expose the strangeness underneath (Elle). Combining biting wit, wild imagination, and “unsettling, hallucinatory” prose, Julia Slavin masterfully satirizes the world of upscale families and young professionals as they confront their greatest fantasies and most grotesque fears in unexpected, and often hilarious, ways (The New York Times Book Review).

Julia Slavin is the author of The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club and Other Stories and the novel Carnivore Diet, which Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post chose as one of the best three books of fiction of 2005. Slavin is the winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, GQ’s Frederick Exley Award, and a Pushcart Prize, and her stories have been translated into Japanese, Italian, and Hebrew. “Covered” was read by Alec Baldwin as part of the Symphony Space Selected Shorts series, and the recording can be heard on the “Too Hot for Radio” podcast. She is currently working on another collection, Stories for Squatters.