Slow Guillotine

By Teo Rivera-Dundas

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1496247310
• ISBN13: 9781496247315
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 0.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"