The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club and Other Stories — Julia Slavin

An edgy, comic, and disturbing debut-a hip Diary of a Mad Housewife.

Julia slavin's tales are bulletins from the front. Suburban young marrieds, the narrators have been stranded by their careers, their homes, their lives. Amidst the punishing schedules dictated by daily demands-baby-proofing the house, folding laundry, steaming carrots, taking clients out to steak houses-they live by their fantasies. Julia Slavin conjures a world that is both familiar and limitless, where daily the banal and the unimaginable brush up against each other. A housewife swallows the shirtless adolescent boy who cuts her lawn. Strolling down the airport corridor to catch his shuttle home, a businessman risks everything to save an eight-pound lobster from certain slaughter and consumption. Maisie Haselkorn of the Eastport Haselkorns, a decent upper-middle-class woman, cuts off her leg-at a posh private club. And something as innocuous as pudding spilled on the kitchen floor might be grounds for divorce. Riotous and inventive, The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club and Other Stories is a riveting read by a surprising new talent.