Exit Zero: Stories

by Marie-Helene Bertino

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Blending seemingly mundane yet emotionally charged fragments of life with backyard unicorns, ghosts and a vampire (or two), this mélange of literary fiction and sci-fi makes all twelve unique tales a treat.

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

A Must-Read: The New York Times Book Review, Bustle, Harper's Bazaar, Chicago Review of Books, Our Culture, Literary Hub
Winner of 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374616489
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/22/2025
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	551 KB

About the Author

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.
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.

Editorial Reviews

02/03/2025

Odd and surreal circumstances shape this potent and darkly funny collection from Bertino (Beautyland). In “Edna in Rain,” a woman’s exes and former crushes fall from the sky one by one while she’s out for a walk, exchanging banter with her that makes her “feel like God’s favorite sitcom.” The title story centers on Jo, an only child, who inherits her estranged father’s house, which comes with a smirking unicorn that lives in the backyard. With the aid of a zookeeper, Jo learns more about the creature, a process that also sheds light on her own life and her father’s legacy. In another delightfully bizarre entry, “Can Only Houses be Haunted?,” a married couple finds that the peaches they bought at a farm stand are possessed by the spirits of dead people. Other stories take a more charming view of horticulture, such as “Flowers and Their Meanings” and the mysterious “The Night Gardener,” the latter of which follows a lonely woman vying for a prize in a gardening contest. Each story is driven by energetic pacing, quick wit, and surprising twists. Bertino once again displays her formidable talent for the uncanny. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

[Exit Zero will] surprise you. And make you laugh. And sometimes devastate you. Sometimes all of the above . . . Everything [Bertino] writes is covered in a slight dusting of magic.”

—Charles Yu, Bomb

“Charming and strange . . . Luminous tales of haunting absurdity.”

—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books

“Exit Zero, like all of Marie-Helene Bertino’s fiction, climb[s] to the rarest heights by combining intuition with emotional wisdom.”

—The Brooklyn Rail

“Exit Zero reveals everyday instances of magic via an expert blend of humor and melancholy.”

—Greta Rainbow, Bustle

“[Exit Zero cuts] at the core of what it means to be alive.”

—Chelsey Sanchez, Harper’s Bazaar

“Bertino’s way of looking at the world continues to dazzle.”

—Sam Franzini, Our Culture

“With winsome wildness capturing the incapturable, Bertino offers up marvels on every page.”

—Annie Bostrom, Booklist

“Stories that slide into the magical while staying determinedly real . . . Bertino’s characters . . . will remind us of our neighbors, our friends, even ourselves as we navigate their worlds in Bertino’s confident hands. Ardently whimsical, yet never centerless.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“There’s a Denis Johnsonesque deadpan lurking in [Exit Zero]. And yet the book also has a spontaneous and intense energy . . . You feel changed . . . intoxicated, as if you expect something very different from reality after having tasted Bertino’s version.”

—Max Winter, On the Seawall

“[A] potent and darkly funny collection . . . driven by energetic pacing, quick wit, and surprising twists. Bertino once again displays her formidable talent for the uncanny.”

—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2025-02-01
Twelve stories that slide into the magical while staying determinedly real.

The protagonists of Bertino’s stories tend to be beleaguered yet brave, quixotic yet stouthearted, bemused by but also compassionately attentive to the strange worlds they find themselves inhabiting. In the title story, Jo, a disaffected event planner for a national association of doctors, travels to her estranged father’s New Jersey home after his death only to discover that, in addition to the detritus of his mostly solitary life, she has also inherited his pet unicorn. In “The Night Gardener,” Claudia prepares her small patch of yard for the local Horticultural Society’s City Gardens Contest in a near-future world wherein species after species is succumbing to extinction. When balloons carrying messages seemingly meant just for her begin to appear in her garden, Claudia switches her focus from bearing witness to a departing world to attempting to communicate with what lies just over the horizon between the living and the dead, the present and the unimaginable future. Bertino’s characters—largely women living through interstitial periods between love affairs (“Edna in Rain,”), during the death throes of marriages (“Can Only Houses Be Haunted?”), between accident and aftermath (“Lottie Woodside and the Diamond Dust Cher”)—are unique in their own right but also comfortable vessels for readers’ experiences of feeling adrift in a world that admits to no defining beginnings and no definitive ends. Even if the reader’s world does not include unicorns, semisentient balloons, or ex-lovers falling from the sky, it is a good bet the characters who experience these travails will remind us of our neighbors, our friends, even ourselves as we navigate their worlds in Bertino’s confident hands.

Ardently whimsical, yet never centerless—solid stories about our tenuous times.

Kirkus Reviews