Slow Guillotine could’ve been written by any of my friends! Rivera-Dundas uncannily captures the ephemeral, irreverent, and realistically disjointed experience of building a sense of self away from home in your early- to mid-20s. The distractions and idiosyncrasies of the public in service, retail, and gig jobs become necessary as we claw out of the pits of despair clinging desperately to whatever dignity we have left and, if we’re lucky, a relatively acceptable credit score. Artsy and weird people constantly gamble on creative dreams, requiring us to find value in our days whether or not we’re one of the ones that achieves fame and multi-million dollar brand deals. This book would be great for readers that like toeing the line between surreality and magical realism and people of any gender in their Weird Girl Era.

Slow Guillotine has a bold, experimental energy, and I can see why the voice will resonate with readers who enjoy boundary-pushing narratives about art, identity, and precarity. That said, the storytelling voice felt a bit too erratic for me personally. I struggled to feel grounded in the narrative, and the perspective and tone skewed younger than what I tend to connect with as a reader. This isn’t a flaw in the writing, just a mismatch between the narrative style and my own reading preferences. Readers who gravitate toward voice-driven, unconventional structures and explorations of gender, community, and artistic ambition will likely find a lot to appreciate here. Even though it ultimately wasn’t the right fit for me, I can absolutely see its appeal for the right audience.

Thank you to NetGalley and Zero Street Fiction for the ARC!

Teo Rivera-Dundas' Slow Guillotine is a beautiful work of queer literature highlighting the ups and downs of working class queer life in New York. So many queer novels take place in large cities, with this work being no exception, though it highlights much less of the grandeur of the city and hones in on the small moments, the rhythm of the bookstore where the main character works, the patterns of the friends and lovers as they move through the world, making it work, whatever that means. The characters are vibrant and engaging, their personalities thriving in the pages, fighting for life in the mundane terror of daily life on the edge. This book is for people who love people, people who want to survive one way or another, people who believe in creating good things wherever they are.

This book really captivated me and swept me away in a lot of ways, and I didn't mind that I didn't come away feeling that there was one strong message or thoroughline through the entire story (rather, that there were a few that kept being revisited). It felt like an honest glimpse into a few peoples' lives and a few distinct themes, and I think I will be thinking about this read for a long time. To my mind, there were parts of this read that felt somewhat anachronistic for what is meant to be a mid-2010s period (characters saying "pov" or "i'm in my [insert thing here] era", 15 second videos rather than 6 second videos being the big "thing"), which did bring me out of the narrative slightly. Despite this, I found the author's description to be very engrossing and their characterization to be deeply engaging. In particular, I felt the choice to somewhat obfuscate characters' gender identities and where they fell on the cis/trans spectrum to be an interesting one, and I enjoyed it, although I found myself wishing this theme was explored more.

Thanks to NetGalley and University of Nebraska Press for providing me with an Advance Readers' Copy in exchange for my honest review.

One of those books that finds you at the perfect time (I had just finished my first watch through of The Sopranos, and I enjoyed the very apt references made throughout the book). This is the type of book that will make you wonder if you have ever read something of the sort. I loved the structure, the characters, and even the snake.

Set in NYC during the early 2000s, three scrappy twenty-somethings are interrupted from their respective creative endeavors by their mundane day jobs. The book takes us through the details of our MC's job as a book seller/shipper; I found this to be particularly comforting, maybe because I like the idea of working in a bookstore myself, or because I found MC's stream of consciousness while he walked us through his day job to be insightful, deep, and funny with undertones of absurdism.

The MC frequently ponders about the books they read, the meaning behind the plots, and the settings in which they read these books and how it connects back to the plot of their own life. The roommates named Precious, Felix, (and eventually Glossy), have their own forms of art they partake in, and we as the readers get to see their personalities, creative ideas, and jobs converge as they all try to balance it under one roof.

The gender loft and the story of the MC (whom we never do get to know their name or gender identity, though we can speculate with context clues) will stick with me for a long time. I look forward to owning a paper copy to go back to the pages I bookmarked during my digital read -- many quotable paragraphs and lines that I hope to return to.

I found myself wanting Ford, the bookshop owner, to have a smaller role than he did in the overall composition of the book, but I wonder if the insufferable nature of his character made this a purposeful feeling to be had by the reader.

Overall, I think this book was sort of brilliant.

This was my very first ARC, and I am very grateful for NetGalley and University of Nebraska Press for the opportunity to read this in exchange for my honest feedback.

"I read books that seem to contain everything in them. Books that are cities, ant colonies where each ant is a word, books that seem both to exist and iterate existence. And then I read books like sheer drapery, a gossamer, a barely there."

Wowza what a line. What a book.

This was fantastic. An interesting real to life story of broke "weirdos" (as noted in description) who work for a book warehouse store. Living. Surving. Dealing with a rotting apartment. I loved this so so much. Loved the characters. The descriptions of adulting and surviving in a city where even management can't afford above poverty. I felt like my own friends were being described. This was amazing.

Thank you to University of Nebraska Press and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review
Slow Guillotine took me by surprise. At first, I really struggled to get into it and had to set it aside. But when I returned, the storytelling really resonated with me. I came to appreciate the quiet, mundane moments, and by the end, I genuinely enjoyed the novel as a whole.
#netgalley #ARC #review

Three broke misfit artists just trying to make it in NYC while working monotonous minimum-wage jobs. Much of the book is scenes of these 3 friends at their respective jobs - a bookseller, a culinary student/party clown, and a gallery receptionist. The stream of consciousness style this was written in really adds to the slightly chaotic feeling of these characters lives, but it was done in a way that is still succinct and intentional. Although there was a loose plot to follow, I was much more interested in the inner reflections of our narrator as they mused through their day to day. As a bookseller myself, the explanations of the inner-workings of an indie bookstore were hilarious to me.

Slow Guillotine really encompasses the suffocated feelings of trying to survive in a big city, especially in the summertime, and I found that the city is almost a character in itself (along with Girlfriend the snake).
The ambiguity of their genders is something that really struck me, as there are several nods to our characters being queer in some capacity, but the need to solidify their identities for us did not feel necessary. I would be excited to read anything from this author in the future!

Thank you University of Nebraska Press & NetGalley for the arc.

I really enjoyed how this flowed. It took some time to really get into it but it was well worth the read.

If you want a book that perfectly captures the messiness and disorientation of your 20s, this is the novel for you. Taking place in a capitalist hellscape that we more commonly know as New York, introducing us to characters who are artists in every sense of the word- except professionally, and subjecting us to the shining example of what it means to “come of age” in a world where you’re just surviving while others are thriving.

I found that the second half of this book picked up the pace from the first half, which took me quite a while to get through. Once I got pulled in, it was a quick read and enjoyable through the finish. I ended up finding the most joy in our narrator’s dreams about Girlfriend and in the lists that ran throughout the book. Overall, this was a very sweet read and I learned so much about the book world.

Thank you NetGalley, Zero Street Fiction, and Teo Rivera-Dundas for the eARC in exchange for a review. “Slow Guillotine” comes out March 1st, 2026.

If you’ve never worked a minimum wage, customer facing job, you won’t get this book. 



I can see why it won the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction - this is a beautifully written bildungsroman for the modern times. Trying to go viral online while working multiple jobs while everything is (literally) falling down around you. Working a job because you don’t know what you want or feel like you got stuck there. Knowing what you want, but not having the time, money, and/or energy to go after it. I got it. I get it.

There’s definitely a sense of incompleteness - but isn’t that your twenties?

Thank you to Zero Street Fiction and NetGalley for my advance copy - all thoughts are my own.

slow guillotine by teo rivera-dundas feels like a dispatch from the front lines of late capitalism, written by someone who is both exhausted by it and morbidly fascinated. it is a timely, highly relatable treatise on how capitalism is slowly eroding us and how it keeps inventing new mechanisms to do so. this is not a glamorous coming of age in new york city. it is a coming of age in debt, in wage labor, in damp apartments and dying independent bookstores.

the unnamed narrator and their two friends are artists in theory and service workers in practice. their days are spent in a failing bookstore, a sterile gallery, and on the long island birthday party clown circuit. the art they want to make is constantly interrupted by the art adjacent jobs that barely keep them alive. the novel circles this tension obsessively. what is work. what is art. what is survival. what is theft.

i found the sections about the bookstore particularly compelling. there is something quietly radical about the way the novel dissects the mechanics of selling books. unpacking them, shelving them, pulping them, returning them. the narrator steals books, yes, but the novel makes it clear that theft is baked into the entire system. the bookstore steals time and labor. publishers pulp excess stock. landlords siphon rent. everyone is extracting from someone else. theft becomes less a moral failing and more a survival reflex in a world where precarity is the baseline condition.

that idea, that in a constant survival mode we all have a price, runs through the book like a low hum. people compromise. they stay in bad jobs. they placate awful bosses. they gentrify neighborhoods by existing in them. they sell out a little because they are tired of grinding themselves down to the bone. the novel does not judge this so much as it observes it. it emphasizes, again and again, that survival has to be communal if it is to mean anything. the friendships here are not sentimentalized, but they are necessary. without them, there would be nothing to hold onto.

stylistically, the book meanders. it feels essayistic at times, almost like autofiction in conversation with itself. that looseness will not work for everyone, but i found it mostly interesting. the narrator's voice is funny, self aware, and capable of sudden sharp insight. there is an ongoing demystification of the publishing and art worlds that feels honest and a little bitter.

my one significant hesitation echoes something other readers have noted. there is a strange, almost throwaway inclusion of top surgery that is not otherwise accompanied by a nuanced exploration of gender identity or dysphoria. the novel gestures toward gender dysphoric embodiment in its description, but in practice it remains coy. i appreciate the existence of queerness here, the casualness of it, the refusal to sensationalize it. but i did wish for more depth, especially given how central embodiment and precarity are to the book's larger themes.

ultimately, slow guillotine captures the messiness and disorientation of your twenties under capitalism with unsettling clarity. it suggests that the blade does not fall all at once. it lowers slowly, incrementally, disguised as rent hikes and minimum wage jobs and the quiet erosion of idealism. and yet, in the face of that, there is still art. still friendship. still the stubborn instinct to think and make and love anyway.

Three friends in their twenties navigate life in New York City, between debt, crappy jobs, and the desire to make art. That's how simply the plot could be summed up. This is one of those books where things don't necessarily happen. But it felt like so much more and I loved it. So here's the extended version. Our unnamed narrator works at a failing independent bookstore. Their roommate and best friend Precious is attempting to pay off college debts by going to culinary school and learning a trade, and when that's not working, he becomes a clown. Narrator's girlfriend Felix is a talented artist working for a soul-sucking gallery. She also obtains a snake and calls it Girlfriend. Construction starts on Narrator and Precious's apartment and it becomes increasingly unliveable, but moving is barely an option. Things are constantly happening and never happening (Felix describes it as friction and Narrator feels like they're in a frictionless place). Also, while not being explicitly queer ever, the apartment is referred to as "The Gender Loft," so something is going on there.
I loved this absurd book. It's really weird. It's super well written. It's really easy to be obsessive about; it's definitely one of those books that I'm going to be thinking about randomly in a few months. Teo Rivera-Dundas is definitely an author to watch. I can't wait to see what's next.