Slow Guillotine

<P><B>Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction</B></P><P><I>Slow Guillotine</I> 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.</P><P>Spanning one year and told through an obsessive first-person present tense, <I>Slow Guillotine</I> 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.</P>