Marie-Helene Bertino
Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of, most recently, Beautyland, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist and a New York Times Notable 100 and Time Magazine Top 10 Book of 2024. She is currently the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University. Exit Zero, her second short story collection and the volume where this story appears, comes out this month from FSG Originals. Bertino’s work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pen/ O. Henry Prize Stories, and Mississippi Review 30, and has been featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” program. She taught for many years in the Creative Writing programs of NYU, The New School, and Institute for American Indian Arts.
This story from Marie-Helene Bertino’s newest collection, Exit Zero, confirms her status as a master of slippery twilight, a true believer that if one sidles up to a threshold just right, she can pass through whatever veil keeps our logic in this universe separate from neighboring realities. The stories in Exit Zero, like all of Marie-Helene Bertino’s fiction, climb to the rarest heights by combining intuition with emotional wisdom.