Dear Readers:
We've found that you can't truly begin to know someone until you get a glimpse of their home. And home can be much more than the place where you go to sleep at night. It can be a place of refuge, or a place where you never feel quite right. It can be a place thousands of miles away that you're not sure you'll ever see again.
In an effort to really get to know our featured authors, we brought Slice to their doorstep for
this issue's theme of Going Home. Shane Dixon Kavanaugh flew to Chicago to chew the fat with Aleksandar Hemon. Sean Jones sat down with Ed White in his cozy Chelsea apartment. We drove to North Carolina to visit Haven Kimmel in her quirky writing studio. And though we weren't able to visit them, Lisa See and Paul Auster talked with us about how their homes have evolved over the years. In all of our conversations with these authors, we quickly discovered that each of their homes offered up unexpected details about their life. And they showed us that with all of the care put into making a home one's own, it inevitably becomes a manifestation of who they are.
This issue is also packed with writing from new voices that simply blew us away. These writers and poets brought the theme of Going Home to life with tales of everything from an invasion of bedbugs to finding a little girl's history in Vietnam, and a bird nesting in an old man's very long beard. There's no one perfect version of home, but these writers have taught us that the most mesmerizing stories take shape through the flaws and details behind our front doors.
Enjoy!
The Editors
•Haven Kimmel
•Aleksandar Hemon
•Paul Auster
•Ed White
•Lisa See
•Alex Littlefield