Slim and The Beast: 10th Anniversary Edition
Novel by Samuél Lopez-Barrantes
Slim and The Beast is an adult American fable set in North Carolina about male intimacy, the pursuit of passion, and the myriad ways in which young men in the USA can either transcend or succumb to that nation’s unresolved and violent past.
With unflinching humor and dexterous prose recalling the Coen Brothers’ wit and Tom Robbins’ iconoclasm, the narrator observes the approaching hurricane and the ghosts it seems to be dredging up, laying out what's at stake in a friendship forged during the calm before the storm of the contemporary USA.
ISBN: 9798989580330
Coming November 8, 2025
SAMUÉL LOPEZ-BARRANTES is a writer and musician. He lives in Paris, where he leads historical walks on modernism, existentialism, and the Nazi Occupation. His debut novel, Slim and The Beast (Inkshares, 2015) was the flagship novel for one of the USA’s first crowdfunded publishers. After buying back his rights in 2022, he became a member of the Substack Grow writers program, co-founded Kingdom Anywhere, an anglophone publisher in Paris, and sold out of the 1st edition of his second novel, The Requisitions, in a few months. Samuél is an active writer on Substack, where he wasa member of the 2022 Substack Grow Writers’ Program. Find out more ifnotparis.substack.com
SLIM AND THE BEAST PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Originally published by Inkshares in 2015 and selling 1300+ copies, the author bought back his rights in 2022 to publish this definitive edition with Kingdom Anywhere, a Paris-based independent anglophone publisher that he co-founded with his wife, the artist Augusta Sagnelli.
While preserving the original spirit of the novel, this revised edition includes a new cover and layout to capture the spirit of an adult fable, complete with stylized chapter illustrations by the author’s twin brother, Aaron Lopez-Barrantes. At 158-pages, the novel reads like a quintessentially southern novel in the style of Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish, who said, “Lopez-Barrantes offers us a glimpse of what the future of letters may be.” Slim and The Beast: 10th Anniversary Edition is a meditation on a USA that once was, an adult American fable about the enduring myths surrounding success, passion, and masculinity in the contemporary USA.