Published in 2025
208 pages
5 hours and 26 minutes
Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of Beautyland, Parakeet, 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas, and the story collection Safe as Houses. She was the 2017 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. She has received the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Mississippi Review Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, and New York City’s Center for Fiction, and her work has twice been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and Mississippi Review 30. She is the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University.
What is this book about?
Death-shaped entities—with all of their humor and strangeness—haunt the twelve stories in Exit Zero. Vampires, ghost girls, fathers, blank spaces, day-old peaches, and famous paintings all pierce through their world into ours, reminding us to pay attention! and look alive! and offering many other flashes of wisdom from the oracle and author of Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino.
