September LGBT+ Book Club - Slow Guillotine

About

Join us for a discussion about our July LGBTQ+ pick Slow Guillotine, by Teo Rivera-Dundas. * This Book Club is for people who identify as a part of the LGBTQ+ community * 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. 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.