With months to go before the release of Lauren Beukes’ first short collection SLIPPING AND OTHER STORIES, news and notes about the book and the author abound.

(source: BRITTLE PAPER)

BRITTLE PAPER gleefully profiles the collection.

Ever since her blockbuster thriller BROKEN MONSTERS, fans have been wondering how much longer they’d have to wait to enjoy more of Beukes’ killer storytelling skills (no pun intended!). The wait, it appears, will soon be over. On August 2, Taychon Publishers will release Beukes’ debut collection of stories titled SLIPPING.

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From the look of things, Beukes has pulled all the stops to meet the high expectations of a global community of fans nurtured on classics such as ZOO CITY and THE SHINING GIRLS.

SLIPPING is an “edgy, satiric” take on a range of themes—“corruption, greed, and even love (of a sort).” “From Johannesburg to outer space,” readers are taken on a “compelling, dark, and slippery ride.”

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Congrats to Beukes! We can’t wait.

Tammy Sparks of BOOKS BONES & BUFFY included SLIPPING in the weekly meme WAITING ON WEDNESDAY.

When I got an email from a very nice publicist at Tachyon Publications, and the word “Beukes” jumped out at me, I knew I would be accepting this book for review. I simply loved BROKEN MONSTERS and ZOO CITY, and I know many people who loved THE SHINING GIRLS. 

The award-winning editor Neil Clarke announced he was the guest fiction editor for a special science and science fiction issue of BERLIN QUARTERLY.

Their budget permitted me to select four reprints, so in this issue you’ll find:

“Slipping” by Lauren Beukes
“Tying Knots” by Ken Liu
“A Brief Investigation of the Process of Decay” by Genevieve Valentine
“The Best We Can” by Carrie Vaughn

As part of Book Riot’s International Women’s Day celebration. Beukes contributed a piece about writers and their cats.

I normally wake up at five am, not from any writerly duty, to use that magic quiet time to steal some words before I have to get my daughter ready for school, although I should, but because our kitten, Sage, jumps onto the bed and starts frantically purring and padding and nipping at my fingers to let me know she was out adventuring but now she’s back and shouldn’t I stroke her and make a fuss and feed her. But this Monday I woke without her to ominous quiet.

I’ve had several writer cats over the years. Smoky, my half-Siamese, half-Persian grey, watched me writing stories in long hand from the time my five year old tiny mind was blown when I discovered that writing was a job you could have, Like, you actually get paid to make up stories! For a living! I’ve never wanted to be anything else since then, although it took me 20 years before I published my first short story.

Sage

Sage was precocious and fearless. She rugby-tackled Ivy and chewed on her head, climbed everything climbable and made great leaps off tables and window sills and down the staircase. She insisted on sitting on our laps while we were writing, but her favourite thing was chasing cockroaches. This made her an even better writer cat than normal, because as you probably know, writers are very fond of snacks. And snacks produce crumbs and crumbs, well, crumbs attract roaches, although I’d never seen one until the great huntress Sage started dragging them out of the dark crannies they hid in and into the dining room where I work during the day, so she could chase them around, while I lifted my feet off the floor and yelped “Just kill it, already!”

All past tense.

Read the rest of Beuke’s magnificent essay at BOOK RIOT.

For the 7th Annual Women in Horror Month, Simon DeWar interviews Beukes.

Q. What have you written? And what is your personal favourite of your own work?

MOXYLAND, about a dystopian corporate-apartheid state where cell phones are used to control you, not like the real world right now at all… Oh god, it’s so depressingly like the real world right now.

ZOO CITY, which won the Arthur C Clarke Award, a phantasmagorical noir, about a young woman with a sloth on her back and the magical ability to find lost things who is asked to track down a missing pop star in the inner city slums of Johannesburg.

The SHINING GIRLS, which won the University of Johannesburg Prize, the Strand Critics Choice Award, the RT Thriller of the Year and was a notable book on Amazon, Goodreads and NPR, about a time-travelling serial killer in Chicago and the survivor who turns the hunt around.

BROKEN MONSTERS about strange murders happening in Detroit, art parties, ruin porn, haunted places and haunted people, which won the August Derleth Prize for Best Horror.

SURVIVOR’S CLUB is an original Vertigo comic by me and Dale Halvorsen with art by Ryan Kelly about six people who survived terrifying events straight from a horror movie as children, who find themselves drawn together as adults. But are they survivors or the chosen ones?

I have a short story collection, SLIPPING AND OTHER STORIES, coming out in the middle of the year.

I’ve also directed a documentary, GLITTERBOYS AND GANGLANDS, about Cape Town’s biggest female impersonation beauty pageant which won best LGBT Film at The Atlanta Black Film Festival.

Check out the rest of the insightful interview at DeWar’s eponymous site.

For more information about SLIPPING AND OTHER STORIES, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Elizabeth Story.