The Chest That Launched a Thousand Slips and Other Stories (ePub)

"Insightful...consistently profound..."- Kirkus Reviews

The Chest That Launched a Thousand Slips' offers up a thrilling assortment of strong characters and prickly situations imagined to their extremes, thought-provoking and sometimes quirky contemporary short fiction that delves into the secret lives and longings of the plastic people.

Blending realism with the fantastic, the stories range from hilarious to disturbing, orderly to twisted, proper to profane. Look beneath the typical clichéd personas and into a super-charged fictional world of beauty surgeons and their most challenging and eccentric clientele as they struggle not only with self-image, relationships, deeper meaning, and aging, but even more so with each other if not themselves.

The ten stories feature a head-backwards person, an MIA body snatcher, a patient on a crashing plane, a medical entrepreneur out to remake the very definition of beauty, a frustrated cosmetic surgeon's wife, an out-of-control robotic eye surgeon, the human soul, and two teeth. The title story is a modern-day retelling of a Greek myth of two powerful and stubborn men battling over the fate of one alluring but conflicted woman.

While the medical details are for the most part accurate, these are not tales about the ins and outs of plastic surgery but rather the ups and downs of the human condition. Plastic surgery plays a supporting role-a common element that provides coherence and continuity to a diverse collection of one-of-a-kind characters, styles, and storylines.

If you enjoy serious but accessible and entertaining short fiction with a healthy dose of satire and humor (think T. C. Boyle, Dave Eggers, Kurt Vonnegut, Deb Olin Unferth, Haruki Murakami), consider giving these stories a try.