The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club and Other Stories [Hardcover]

Julia Slavin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 7, 1999

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Julia Slavin likes to start off her stories with wayward body parts. "I once loved a woman who grew teeth all over her body," begins "Dentaphilia." Things are no more comfortable in "He Came Apart": "His hair comes out in my hands." And the title story kicks off, "Word spread down East Beach that a woman had cut off her foot in front of the Maidstone Club." Slavin's people dwell in the suburbs, midway between city and country, realism and surrealism. In the title story, her cast of characters, sprouting names like Pasty Plugh and Skimpy Pimscott, watches with well-bred lack of interest as Maisie Haselkorn saws away. Slavin creates a sharp little drama here, achieving the absurdity that is her quarry.

But it is the stories that demonstrate less showmanship and more sensitivity that make Slavin a writer to watch. "Painting House" finds two hormone-addled step-siblings minding the house while their parents are away. The boy makes a gift of a pretty dress to the tough-talking girl narrator, and Slavin gets just right the way a teenage girl's sexuality is channeled through her clothing: "I felt the dress grazing the back of my thighs, the material clinging to my waist." The dress is not like a lover; it is a lover. "Pudding" mixes satire and realism to fine effect, limning the travails of that family we all know--the one that can't bear to impose rules and so lives in chaos, represented here by a glob of dessert that resides for months on the kitchen floor. "The top of the pudding is smooth and cool like marble, something children love to touch." When she goes for spectacular effects, Slavin is good. But when she goes quiet, she's even better. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly

In this debut collection of 12 short stories with surrealistic twists, Slavin's imagination and sense of humor combine like a funhouse mirror: reality is still visible, but utterly changed. In one crazy minute the narrator of "Swallowed Whole," a woman who is on fertility drugs, goes from obsessing about the teenager who cuts her lawn to swallowing him in the throes of an insatiable kiss, in essence carrying him as one would a fetus. In other examples of life run amok, objects like a childhood security blanket ("Covered") take on a menacing life of their own, while seemingly normal people are inexplicably visited with science fictional afflictions, such as the woman who grows teeth all over her body ("Dentaphilia"). Even in these bizarre situations, Slavin touches the heart, but she verges on pathos in the more conventional stories, such as "Rare Is a Cold Red Center," in which she expertly evokes a group of young employees at a restaurant through the voice of the vulnerable teenage cook trying to make good on his attempts to detox. Other fine tales describe domestic discord ("Pudding") and fanatic careerism ("He Came Apart"). In the standout title story, Slavin wickedly satirizes the desiccated members of a snooty club in the Hamptons who find sexual satisfaction only with the despised parvenus (named Loeb and Donatucci and Moskowitz) who have brought new money into the community. Slavin's penchant for the grotesque is initially startling, but her gruesomely funny view of modern life can be memorable. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 194 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (July 7, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805060855
• ISBN-13: 978-0805060850
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,109,750 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You won't be able to put it down., March 16, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club and Other Stories (Paperback)

Each short story is a wonderful work of imagination and creativity. The reader is taken into the lives of very bazaar individuals afflicted with such things as teeth on their body, bodyparts falling off, or those inanormed with the tree outside the bedroom window. Very fun to read if you are in the mood for something out of the ordinary.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sick, Twisted and AMAZING, July 20, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club and Other Stories (Hardcover)

Never have i read such a collection of short stories! Julia Slavin is an absolute genious when it comes to mixing extremely unsettling situations with intense dark humor. I can't get enough of this book! Buy it now, read it often.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A compelling beginning that dwindled towards the end., July 6, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club and Other Stories (Hardcover)

Slavin's stories provoke a wide range of responses. They are simultaneously funny, sad and disturbing. It was fascinating to read the first few stories and to imagine how these stange situations would end, however, as one read on, the stories became somewhat formulaic and the outcomes unsurprising. I found it hard to maintain my enthusiasm for the book.