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.
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