Description
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
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 03/01/2026
Pages: 220
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.57lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.50d
ISBN13: 9781496247315
ISBN10: 1496247310
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | LGBTQ+ | General
- Fiction | Friendship
- Fiction | Biographical & Autofiction
About the Author
Teo Rivera-Dundas is a writer in western Massachusetts. His work has received support from the Wassaic Project, Anderson Center at Tower View, California Institute of the Arts, and the University of California, San Diego. His writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Meridian, Tupelo Quarterly, and Desperate Literature's annual Eleven Stories anthology, among other publications.