Slow Dancing

Finalist for the National Book Award: A sassy, cynical professional woman's notions of love--and its apparent impossibility--are thrown into question by a man who challenges everything she thought she knew Though a talented young immigration lawyer, Lexi Steiner is in trouble. The legal organization where she works in Los Angeles may soon go under. Her habit of engaging in daring flings with charming--and sometimes not-so-charming--men is losing its luster. And her most intimate relationship of all, the one with her college best friend, Nell, is about to be threatened by two men: Nell's serious new lover, and Lexi's: a divorced investigative reporter who does the unthinkable and falls in love with her. A fast-paced, sexy, and very serious novel about love and ambition, about bicoastal best friends and enduring lovers, Slow Dancing is a captivating look at lives and hearts in transition, moving forward one tentative step at a time.

About the Author :
Elizabeth Benedict is a novelist, essayist, editor, and creative writing teacher. Her novels include the bestseller Almost, the National Book Award finalist Slow Dancing, and her most recent, The Practice of Deceit, which the Boston Globe called "a wickedly funny literary suspense novel." In the Chicago Tribune, Anne Tyler praised her second novel, The Beginner's Book of Dreams, for "the world it spreads before us," which is "complex, fascinating, bewildering, sometimes morbidly funny, always unlaid with pain. The marvel is that such a sad book could be such a joy to read." Benedict's essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, the Rumpus, Esquire, Allure, Harper's Bazaar, Salmagundi, and Dædalus. She is the editor of two anthologies: Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, and the New York Times bestseller What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most. Benedict has taught creative writing at Princeton, Columbia, Swarthmore, Massachussets Institute of Technology, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She teaches every summer at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore, and works year round as a writing coach and editor. Learn more about Benedict and her work at elizabethbenedict.com and DontSweatTheEssay.com.

Review :
"[A] well-knit first novel, [which] adds some new variations to an increasingly popular theme . . . the novel's strength is in its sympathetic portraits of three well-meaning people more comfortable in their public roles than in their private lives. Miss Benedict has written an unsentimental homage to a generation still struggling to grow up." --The New York Times "As the characters slowly circle one another, feeling out the territory, they cut beneath mere surface--into credible apprehension, the conflicts of friendship vs. love, the fears of change . . . A talented debut." --Kirkus Reviews