Exit Zero: Stories - Paperback

by Marie-Helene Bertino (Author)

A Best Book of the Year - Boston Globe - Literary Hub - Electric Literature

"[Marie-Helene] Bertino blurs the line between writer and magician . . . Dazzling." --Molly Young, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

Electric Literature's Best Short Story Collection of 2025
A Must-Read: The New York Times Book Review, Bustle, Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, Chicago Review of Books, Our Culture, Literary Hub, Book Riot
Long-listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
Long-listed for the Story Prize
Winner of a PEN/O. Henry Prize: "Exit Zero"
Included in The Best American Short Stories: "Viola in Midwinter"

Twelve delightfully strange, haunting stories from the acclaimed, oracular author of Beautyland.

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.

Author Biography

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 PEN/O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Mississippi Review Fiction Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Sewanee Writers Conference, and New York City's Center for Fiction, and her work has twice been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts.