Full 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.
Contents
Ten Notes About Work Before We Can Get Started
Another Note (To the Reader)
In the Summer We Are Inside Preparing Food
A Snake Appearing in Dreams
I Have Yet to Develop a Skincare Routine
Ten More Notes About Work
Still Winter
Look How Badly It Wants to Live
Weeks Not Months
Final Ten Notes About Work
Acknowledgments
