Slow Guillotine - (Zero Street Fiction) by Teo Rivera-Dundas (Paperback)

About the Book

Using humor and thoughtful poetics to examine the impact structural violence takes on the body, 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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Slow Guillotine's subversive, heat-seeking pulse is defiantly pro-ennui, embracing projectile vomit and the thing we want most besides love, that is--language at the very edge, and the shedding of our perpetually too-snug skins."--Jess Arndt, author of Large Animals: Stories

"An incisive, fluid, and absurdly funny portrait of both the bookselling industry and of what it's like to try to piece a life together in Manhattan while young(ish) and poor. Whether talking about book-return scams, clowns, social media, cooking, the awfulness of searching for an apartment, tattooing, or pop-ups, Slow Guillotine is sharply observant as it eviscerates the movie myth of New York and replaces it with something less romantic but much more real, current, and painfully hilarious."--Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

"Teo Rivera-Dundas makes the banal shine brilliantly--because when you're young and in New York, geared with friendship, queerness, and art, even the most mundane trivialities can turn into bold misadventures. Slow Guillotine is a tender, slithering threat: hope hovering, ready to strike."--Lily Hoang, author of A Bestiary

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.