Join First Light Books for a celebration of The Slip in paperback. Lucas Schaefer's debut novel, set in an Austin boxing gym in the summer of 1998, won the Kirkus Prize, was named one of the Washington Post's 10 Best Books of the Year, and landed on the New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books list. The Washington Post called it "a sweaty masterpiece." Now it's back in paperback, and we're throwing a party.

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The evening will feature readings by Oscar Casares, Taisia Kitaiskaia, Mary Pauline Lowry, Maya Perez, and Lucas himself. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. for mingling, with readings beginning at 6:30.

Free and open to the public. RSVPs are encouraged.

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About the book

National Bestseller. Winner of the Kirkus Prize. NBCC John Leonard Prize Finalist. One of the New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2025. One of the Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2025.

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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.

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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 all the wrong places.

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The Slip is a haymaker of an American novel about a missing teenage boy, cases of fluid and mistaken identity, and the transformative power of boxing.

Tea Obreht called it "everything an epic novel should be: symphonic, expansive, irresistibly engrossing, utterly unpredictable."

Elizabeth McCracken said it "will grab you by the lapels, the throat, the heart, the hand."

And Anthony Marra, writing in The New York Times, called it "wildly ambitious and immensely rewarding."

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About the author

Lucas Schaefer lives with his family in Austin. The Slip is his first novel. His fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, The Baffler, and Slate. He holds an MFA from the New Writers Project at UT-Austin.

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About the readers

Oscar Casares is the author of the novel Where We Come From and the story collection Brownsville, an American Library Association Notable Book. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Taisia Kitaiskaia was born in the Soviet Union and raised in the United States. She is the author of The Nightgown and Other Poems, Literary Witches (an NPR Best Book of 2017), and two volumes of Ask Baba Yaga. Her story "Engelond" was chosen by Lauren Groff for The Best American Short Stories 2024. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the James A. Michener Center for Writers.

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Mary Pauline Lowry is the author of the novels Last Night Was Killer, The Roxy Letters, and Wildfire. Her work has appeared in O Magazine, The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine. She writes Make It Funny, a Substack about comedic books and pop culture. She lives in Hyde Park, a block and a half from First Light.

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Maya Perez is a television producer, screenwriter, and fiction writer. She was an executive story editor on Showtime's American Rust and an executive producer on the Emmy Award-winning On Story on PBS for eleven seasons. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Texas Monthly, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, and Joyland. She teaches screenwriting at the University of Texas at Austin and is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers.

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