Zero Street Fiction – serie

Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in FictionAmy Black, a queer single mother and an aspiring artist in love with calligraphy, dreams of a coveted artist’s residency at the world’s largest social media company, Q. One ink-black October night, when the power is out in the hills of Oakland, California, a stranger asks Amy to transcribe a love letter for him. When the stranger suddenly disappears, Amy’s search for the letter’s recipient leads her straight to Q and the most beautiful illuminated manuscript she has ever seen, the Codex Argentus, hidden away in Q’s Library of Books That Don’t Exist-and to a group of data privacy vigilantes who want her to burn Q to the ground.Amy’s curiosity becomes her salvation, as she’s drawn closer and closer to the secret societies and crackpot philosophers that haunt the city’s abandoned warehouses and defunct train depots. All of it leads to an opportunity of a lifetime: an artist’s residency deep in the holographic halls of Q headquarters. It’s a dream come true-so long as she follows Q’s rules.

Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction"A funny and moving debut."-Charles Arrowsmith, The Washington Post“A love letter to Berlin, to travel, and to saying yes to life.”-Alan CummingIt’s the new millennium and the anxiety of midlife is creeping up on Sam Singer, a thirty-seven-year-old art advisor. Fed up with his partner and his life in New York, Sam flies to Berlin to attend a gallery opening. There he finds a once-divided city facing an identity crisis of its own. In Berlin the past is everywhere: the graffiti-stained streets, the candlelit cafÉs and techno clubs, the astonishing mash-up of architecture, monuments, and memorials.A trip that begins in isolation evolves into one of deep connection and possibility. In an intensely concentrated series of days, Sam finds himself awash in the city, stretched in limbo between his own past and future-in nightclubs with Jeremy, a lonely wannabe DJ; navigating a flirtation with Kaspar, an East Berlin artist he meets at a cafÉ; and engaged in a budding relationship with Magda, the enigmatic and icy manager of Sam’s hotel, whom Sam finds himself drawn to and determined to thaw. I Make Envy on Your Disco is at once a tribute to Berlin, a novel of longing and connection, and a coming-of-middle-age story about confronting the person you were and becoming the person you want to be.

Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in FictionFantastical, sensual, and as beguilingly strange as they are insightful and real, the stories of All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere are centered around intimate familial or romantic relationships, featuring protagonists who make awesome discoveries-from the beautiful to the horrible-in seemingly mundane situations. The protagonists in each story come from marginalized communities, which sometimes exacerbates their problems but always allows for unique perspectives and epiphanies.A violinist nearly hits a bicyclist with her car on her rush to rehearsal, leading to a blissful affair and speculation about the effect of love on her violin playing. The whispering of schoolgirls leads a teacher to consider her own fears and failings. In the title story the nature of motherhood, fatherhood, and familial pride plays against a backdrop of death and high school theater.These are stories of human frailty and newfound strengths, with surprising confrontations. The writing is rich and playful, whether the characters are coy or startlingly direct, creating worlds in which the metaphorical might become literal in the blink of an eye. DeMisty D. Bellinger finds magic in the smallest moments and makes the biggest moments resonate with a quiet intensity.

Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in FictionDaddy Issues is a collection of moving and complex-yet simply and directly told-stories of queer Asian American experiences in Los Angeles. In many of these stories, the protagonists are artists and writers and other creative thinkers living on the fringe of survival, attempting to align a life of the imagination with the practical considerations of career, income, and family: a gay father who hasn’t come out to his young son; a social worker, numbed by the destitution of his clients, who finds himself lost in self-destruction; a trans man who returns home to a father with dementia to help his family pack as they are pushed out by gentrification; a husband who can only stand aside as his wife heals from a miscarriage; and a broke writer who learns to love his stories again.The stories in Daddy Issues offer different contemplations on solitude-the good and the bad of it. Ultimately, this collection by Eric C. Wat is full of hope, and it shows how we can find the connections we need once we allow ourselves to become vulnerable.

Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in FictionSlow 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.