Bender is able to infuse such emotion with her stories, pairing strange occurrences and abilities with powerful relationship dynamics. This happens while her mother is having a psychotic episode, and as Francie grows up, more, similar events happen, and she has to come to terms with the reality of those moments, and what they mean. It begins with the main character, Francie, swallowing a butterfly that matches the butterflies on a nearby lampshade. Her most recent novel makes no exception, with a coming-of-age story showing the other-worldly power of objects and memories. For others, these picks may be too weird.Īimee Bender is a master of strange stories. Perhaps some may be not weird enough for some readers.

Each are a bit weird for mainstream, but also not quite genre. Which brings us to the three examples listed below. That slippery, delicate quality sets it slightly apart from other pieces that might also be classified under weird fiction.” Three Current Examples of Slipstream Booksĭespite hovering on the periphery of speculative and weird fiction for 30 years, slipstream still lingers, haunting speculative and weird fiction realms. “To me has some relation to writing that is weird or uncanny, but I also feel like a slipstream story is necessarily tethered to our world in a distinct way,” she wrote in an email, then added, “The word slipstream itself calls to mind something thin and permeable, darting in and out of a body of water, or drifting from one world (ours) to something else. Isabel Yap, author of the collection of stories Never Have I Ever, had her first encounter with slipstream while submitting to (and later reading slush for) the now defunct journal Interfictions Online, which specialized in interstitial works. “I don’t know if I ever thought of the kind of writing I was doing using the term, but wherever it still appears I expect to find kindred spirits - the writers collected under slipstream fifteen years ago (or under speculative or fabulist or nonrealist or genre-bending today) are and always will be my people.” “For me, the term slipstream (which I never encountered all that much, as evocative as I found it) was for a time a portal to the worlds I wanted to visit: so many of my favorite writers could be collected under such a term, people like Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, Jeff VanderMeer, Jonathan Lethem, Jeffrey Ford, and the others who appeared in Feeling Very Strange,” Bell wrote in an email to me. In its description, slipstream stands “poised between literature and popular culture,” with stories of “visionary strangeness” that specifically defy science fiction.Īuthor Matt Bell, of the upcoming novel Appleseed and well-known for his speculative fiction, counts Feeling Very Strange as his first encounter with slipstream: Among those in its table of contents are many authors we know and love in speculative fiction: Aimee Bender, Ted Chiang, Karen Joy Fowler, Jeff VanderMeer, and others. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel edit an anthology titled Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology. Cover of Feeling Very Strange slipstream anthology

Slipstream partisan