Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction
Slow Guillotine follows three broke weirdos whose collective desire to make and think about art is constantly interrupted by their art-industry-adjacent minimum-wage jobs. Throughout the novel, the three friends’ day jobs in a failing independent bookstore, a sterile gallery in downtown Manhattan, and miscellaneous living rooms across the Long Island birthday-party-clown circuit interweave with their attempts to come to terms with their precarity, gender-dysphoric embodiment, and the floating dream of collective liberation.
Spanning one year and told through an obsessive first-person present tense, Slow Guillotine brings the bildungsroman structure through the autofictional looking glass, questioning how “coming of age” could be feasible in a society of debtors, wage laborers, and renters.
Author: Teo Rivera-Dundas
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 03/01/2026
Series: Zero Street Fiction
Pages: 220
Weight: 0.57lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9781496247315
Language: English
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