Lucas Schaefer, author of The Slip, in conversation with Aube Rey Lescure
When:
Friday, Jun 13, 2025 7:00p -
8:00p
Friday, Jun 13, 2025 7:00p -
8:00p
Where:
Porter Square Books
1815 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, MA 02140
Admission:
FREE
Hosted by:
Categories:
Lectures & Conferences
Event website:
https://www.portersquarebooks.com/event/lucas-schaefer-author-slip-conversation-aube-rey-lescure
Porter Square Books is excited to welcome author Lucas Schaefer to celebrate his debut novel, The Slip. Author Aube Rey Lescure will join Schaefer in conversation. This event will take place on Friday, June 13 at 7pm at Porter Square Books (1815 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02140).
Our Cambridge store offers validated parking in the lot on Roseland St. behind Lesley's University Hall. See parking details below.
RSVP to let us know you're coming and to receive event updates!*
*Please note that you will not receive a confirmation email. However, we will send a reminder email one day before the event. Please check your spam folder if you do not see the pre-event email reminder. Better yet, add [email protected] to your safe sender list to avoid PSB event emails going to spam!
ABOUT THE SLIP
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by LitHub, Debutiful, and CrimeReads
For readers of Jonathan Franzen and Nathan Hill comes a haymaker of an American novel about a missing teenage boy, cases of fluid and mistaken identity, and the transformative power of boxing.
Austin, Texas: It’s the summer of 1998, and there’s a new face on the scene at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein has never felt comfortable in his own skin, but under the tutelage of a swaggering, Haitian-born ex-fighter named David Dalice, he begins to come into his own. Even the boy’s slightly stoned uncle, Bob Alexander, who is supposed to be watching him for the summer, notices the change. Nathaniel is happier, more confident—tanner, even. Then one night he vanishes, leaving little trace behind.
Across the city, Charles Rex, now going simply by “X,” has been undergoing a teenage transformation of his own, trolling the phone sex hotline that his mother works, seeking an outlet for everything that feels wrong about his body, looking for intimacy and acceptance in a culture that denies him both. As a surprising and unlikely romance blooms, X feels, for a moment, like he might have found the safety he’s been searching for. But it's never that simple.
More than a decade later, Nathaniel’s uncle Bob receives a shocking tip, propelling him to open his own investigation into his nephew’s disappearance. The resulting search involves gymgoers past and present, including a down-on-his-luck twin and his opportunistic brother; a rookie cop determined to prove herself; and Alexis Cepeda, a promising lightweight, who crossed the US-Mexico border when he was only fourteen, carrying with him a license bearing the wrong name and face.
Bobbing and weaving across the ever-shifting canvas of a changing country, The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.
PRAISE FOR THE SLIP
"Lucas Schaefer’s big, bold, raunchy, tender, comic, philosophical, Austin-set boxing novel is also an unflinching examination of race and sex in America. It’s absolutely bursting with memorable characters and outrageous scenes, and the sentence level writing is nothing short of superb. Truly one of the most impressive debuts I’ve read in years, The Slip is a knockout."—Lit Hub
“A fascinating novel full of so much life. Lucas Schaefer takes a lapidary eye to these characters and Austin, holding them up to the light and tracing stories only he could tell. I can’t think of another writer like this except maybe Márquez, though I think The Slip is bawdier than his work—and thus, a novel he might have loved.”—Alexander Chee, bestselling author of The Queen of the Night
"How can a book be uproarious and thought provoking, devil-may-care and philosophical, as full of life in all its ugliness and beauty and strangeness as Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip? Complicated and comic, this is a novel about what it means to long to be otherwise, with a mystery at its heart, as well as love and ruthlessness and the kind of crazy imagination missing lately from American fiction. You may not be ready for it, but this is a book which will grab you by the lapels, the throat, the heart, the hand: everywhere."—Elizabeth McCracken, bestselling author of The Hero of This Book
“With The Slip, Austin, TX finally gets the incisive, warmhearted, epic treatment it deserves. Lucas Schaefer is a master of social detail."—Karan Mahajan, author of National Book Award finalist The Association of Small Bombs
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Lucas Schaefer lives with his family in Austin. The Slip is his first novel.
Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer. She grew up between Provence, northern China, and Shanghai, and graduated from Yale University in 2015. Aube’s debut novel, River East, River West, was published in 2024 by William Morrow in the US and Duckworth in the UK. It has been shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Maya Angelou Book Award, the Stanfords Fiction with a Sense of Place Award, and longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize and the Dublin Literary Award. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Granta, Guernica, LitHub, Electric Literature, The Millions, WBUR, and more. Her essay “At the Bend of the Road” was selected for Best American Essays 2022.
PARKING
Porter Square Books: Cambridge Edition offers validated parking in the lot on Roseland St. behind Lesley's University Hall. Roseland Street is accessible by Beacon Street and Mass Ave. When you arrive at the lot, use the screen on the kiosk to get a ticket.
When you're ready to leave, ask for a validation barcode at the cash register. (No purchase necessary.) Parking is free on weekends and weekday evenings from 6PM-7AM. From 7AM-6PM on weekdays the first 45 minutes are free.
Upon exiting the lot, scan your ticket and choose "validation." Then scan the barcode your received from us. If you have an additional charge, you will be prompted to pay after scanning your barcode.
RSVP Form:
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