slab

On that hallelujah day when tiger & preacher meet

Inspired by SLAB

TIGER—STRIPPER, FELON, BESTSELLING AUTHOR—ON DANCING AS HELEN KELLER, HER GRANDFATHER’S SUICIDE, 18TH CENTURY KILLERS, AND THE BEST RED VELVET CAKE.

On a slab that's all Katrina left of her Mississippi home, Tiger tells her story, and it is as American as Horatio Alger, Schwab's Pharmacy, and a tent revival. She was a stripper, but is she now a performance artist and best-selling author, and it is really Barbara Walters she's narrating this tale to? We're too dazzled to know more than that this is about how a girl ends up in the backwash of decadence and sin and how out of the flotsam and jetsam she might construct a story of herself and the South to carry her to salvation.

Serial killers, preachers, and prison flower-arranging classes. Bikers, bad boyfriends, and a stripper who performed as a Trans Am. Tiger has seen it all and as she sits on her slab, identifying anecdotes as they go by, we witness Selah Saterstrom at her greatest—funny, bawdy, and steeped in the landscape and all the devastation it has created and absorbed.

REVIEWS

In her latest novel Selah Saterstrom confirms her status as one of America’s premier narrative archaeologists. —Los Angeles Review

The writing constantly swerves from the sensational to the sincere, which gives it resonance and, ultimately, makes the book so darn likeable. . . . Slab is a definite must-read. —NewPages

[Slab is] absorbingly, concisely written . . . weirdly wonderful. —Library Journal

[Saterstrom has] a poet’s ear for language and a comic’s feel for timing. . . . Complicated, beautiful, whimsical, troubling, and heart-breaking. —Full-Stop

Bawdy, funny, and thought-provoking. . . . Deeply southern, very American, decadent and devastating. —BookRiot

Saterstrom has created a novel told in several genres. . . . If you like something a bit unusual, and you appreciate new approaches to storytelling, this may be the tale for you. —Georgia Review

Saterstrom’s narrators charm the reader with their mix of naivete, natural curiosity, and keen, intelligent observation. . . . The novel’s stark and varied form also mimics a careful sleight of hand. —Atticus Review

[Tiger] navigates the world around her with guile and intelligence, and each act or chapter adds facet-like depth and meaning . . . As Slab makes clear: in this world which daily hoists abuse and crisis and deprivation on our souls, there’s still room for saving grace and experimental books that are a pleasure to read. —Southern Literary Review

Saterstrom’s strength as an author is her ability to straddle this line between the colloquial and the academic while offering us a deeply flawed protagonist who is both compelling and tragic. —Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Offbeat. Comic. Bawdy. Savage. Moving. —Lively Arts

[Slab] brings up questions that are deeper than the comical nature of some of the tales, such as, ‘Do you believe in life after death?’ . . . There is meaning to be taken from Slab. You simply have to find it in your own way, just as Tiger does. —Memphis Flyer

Saterstrom writes with a poet’s economy and eye for visceral detail, collapsing into a mere 140 pages a four-generation history of a Southern family bedeviled by alcoholism, poverty, racism, violence, and mental illness. Her spareness is a mercy. The story she tells is brutal, almost impossible to take; at the same time, her exquisite, cut-to-the-quick language makes this book impossible to put down. —HuffPost

Slab speaks of card reading's "poetry of disarray" as a method of divination, as well as the compositional methods found in the art of Japanese flower arranging, and these are likened to each other, and implicitly linked to the book itself. In the end, too, is the truth that preaching is a performance the same way stripping is, and both are similar to a book that speaks of its visions nakedly. —Bookslut

In the end, Slab is more than a novel. The elements of play, poetry, art, prose, interview, and the many other things that have gone into this work make it artwork. Saterstrom’s latest is a beautiful, engaging piece of art that will be over before you know it. Like the best art, as well, it begs your attention again and again. Like with other great works of art, going back to Slab reveals more and more each time. —Sam Slaughter, Small Press Book Review

Selah Saterstrom's novel Slab is a compelling and innovatively told story of tragedy and hope, and is one of the year's finest books. —largehearted boy

One quickly sees in Saterstrom’s work that ‘religion,’ ‘spirituality,’ and ‘divination’ cannot be easily separated….The hermeneutics of listening that I am stressing does less to stage the poet and allows for more intimate and collaborative interaction between the listener and the writer, by attempting to find a mode of encountering the work.  As the poets divine, we divine them.  We are entangled with them. —Roger Green, The New Polis

“At once both warmly familiar and strangely terrifying, Selah Saterstrom’s writing took what I felt to be a comforting ritual and turned it on its head. Reinvigorating what I knew as literature and as reading, Saterstrom injected an electrifying pulse of stark realism, dark humor, and disturbing imagery.” —Ashley Alfirevic, Colorado State University

Interviews

Slab is one of those novels that hits you fast and hard, that you finish in one sitting, gulping down like an ice-cold glass of water. —Weird Sister

Its subject matter will be familiar: Southern poverty, institutional misogyny, gun violence, Hurricane Katrina, the Confederate Flag, and most painfully, their amalgam wound. Its perspective, though, promises to be wholly new: Tiger is a ferocious protagonist whose spirit outgrows her circumstance so long as it’s not stultified by weary traditions. —Brazos Bookstore

Excerpt

“The color of cabbage rot, slow and cold, opaque water…” —Water, Water Everywhere