The Slip | The Saturday Paper

Miriam Webster’s debut short story collection, The Slip, is also the debut publication for Sydney-based independent Aniko Press as it expands into long-form publishing from its successful literary journal format. It’s a strong debut for both, setting Aniko up as a publisher to watch for interesting writers and Webster as an exciting new voice in Australian fiction.

The 10 stories collected here explore domesticity against a multitude of dissipating desires. Affairs are over before they’ve begun, high-school sweethearts find themselves searching for connections both inside and outside their marriages, and tensions run high as desperate attempts are made to mend relationships. For the most part, Webster sets her stories in Melbourne suburbs or regional Victoria, giving them a familiar grounding that balances the elements of surrealism.

Veering off course, the fantastically weird “New Directions” is a surprisingly tender highlight. Its placing – early on but after a couple of stories that seem to offer a handle on the collection – means the wildly experimental form becomes another nod to the sense that things are out of kilter. Framed with versions of the author’s own emails submitting the story to literary magazines, it soon transforms into a jagged narrative written partly from the perspective of an eel wriggling his way out to sea, high on the drugs that have infiltrated the water system. If you can quote Freud while imagining Finding Nemo crossed with Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, you won’t be too far off.

Elsewhere, the collection is less abstract though no less surprising. A one-night stand with a rock star goes in an unexpected direction (they really aren’t like us, after all). A couple go on holiday to break the tension that has crept into their relationship, but something is off, even before the twin arrivals of an old friend and the biggest storm in recorded history, and a portentous New Year’s Eve promises the end of a run of bad luck.

Webster’s notes at the end of the book offer an illuminating reading list of fiction, literary theory, psychology and prose poetry, and it shows. Her writing is varied and assured. It’s refreshing to read a collection of such different stories, with a wide array of characters and narrative tone. Despite that, there are through lines, and the collection wends its way across landscapes of loss, exploring quiet, nuanced grief in inventive and not always obvious ways.

Aniko Press, 240pp, $29.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
August 23, 2025 as “Miriam Webster, The Slip”.

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