The University of Nebraska Press is pleased to announce the selection of the next book in the fiction series, Zero Street. Slow Guillotine by Teo Rivera-Dundas will be published on March 1, 2026.

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, scenes at work—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 the three friends’ attempts to come to terms with their precarity, gender-dysphoric embodiment, and the floating dream of collective liberation.

“Slow Guillotine is a witty, strange, and poetic portrait of artists and book lovers left to fend for themselves in New York, a city both welcoming and hostile to their creative approaches to making a living,” Series Editor Timothy Schaffert writes. “Whatever their circumstances—love affairs, high rent, fleeting employment—they long for happiness and contentment, a longing described with warmth and intelligence.”

Slow Guillotine is the winner of the Barbara DiBernard Award, a prize for a book published by Zero Street and named for Dr. DiBernard who was professor emerita in the Department of English and the Women’s and Gender Studies program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. As a scholar, activist, teacher, and mentor, Dr. DiBernard was a pioneer in LGBTQ+ literary studies, women’s literature, and disability studies, and a longtime advocate for LGBTQ+ authors and publishing.

“I am so extremely honored to join the Zero Street Fiction catalogue, and for Slow Guillotine to be selected for the Barbara DiBernard award,” said Teo Rivera-Dundas. “Working with series editor Timothy Schaffert has been a dream come true—he is such a sharp, thoughtful editor and a wonderful co-conspirator. It is hard to imagine the novel ending up in anyone else’s hands. Publishing very rarely elicits the feeling of homecoming, I think, but that is exactly how it feels to be brought into the Zero Street orbit. I can’t wait to see future books from the series.”

Rivera-Dundas is a writer in western Massachusetts. His work has received support from the Wassaic Project, Anderson Center at Tower View, California Institute of the Arts, and the University of California, San Diego. His writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Meridian, Tupelo Quarterly, and Desperate Literature’s annual Eleven Stories anthology, among other publications.

Series Editor SJ Sindu writes, “What drew me to Slow Guillotine was the voice. Irreverent, confident, and fully in control. I’d trust this voice to take me through any story. Rivera-Dundas is a force, and that talent is on full display in this novel.”

Zero Street is committed to LGBTQ+ literary fiction with commercial potential, providing LGBTQ+ authors opportunities for a wide readership in the trade fiction market. The series editors are Timothy Schaffert, bestselling author of The Perfume Thief, and SJ Sindu, author of Blue-Skinned Gods. The series seeks LGBTQ+ literary fiction of all kinds, from stories of modern life to innovations on traditions of genre and are particularly interested in BIPOC authors, trans authors, and queer authors over 50.

The submission period for Zero Street is November 1 through April 1. For more information, click here.