Slow Guillotine -- Teo Rivera-Dundas, Paperback

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: 3/1/2026
Pages: 220
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.57 lbs
Size: 8.5" H x 5.5" L x 0.5" W
ISBN: 9781496247315

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