Barbara the Slut and Other People

Fearless, candid, and incredibly funny, Lauren Holmes is a newcomer who writes like a master. A literary star on the rise, her work has appeared in Guernica and Granta, where she was a 2014 New Voice. Her debut, Barbara the Slut: And Other People, is a head-turning collection of wry, intelligent, and sharply observed stories that tackle sex, family, and relationships with a deceptively light touch and a genius for revealing our most vulnerable selves.
 
Throughout Barbara the Slut, Holmes introduces us to a cast of varied and pitch-perfect characters, many of whom are young millennials navigating the complexities of modern sexual politics, unafraid to expose their awkwardness and insecurities. A law school grad takes a job selling sex toys in San Francisco rather than embarking on the career for which she’s prepared. A woman realizes she much prefers the company of her pit-bull—and herself—to the neurotic foreign fling who won’t decamp from her apartment. A daughter hauls a suitcase of lingerie to Mexico for her flighty, estranged mother, all the while questioning her personal mission of coming out. A young woman with an autistic brother, a Princeton acceptance letter, and a love of sex traverses her high school’s toxic, slut-shaming culture with open eyes. Each of these characters and their stories emerges with utter originality while at the same time revealing the flaws that make us all human.
 
With heart and piercing insight, this collection introduces a writer with a limitless career before her. Coming from the publisher who brought readers Claire Vaye Watkins’s Battleborn, Danielle Evans’s Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, and Junot Diaz’s Drown, Barbara the Slut continues Riverhead’s tradition of first-rate short fiction.