April 22, 2025
The Center for Fiction is thrilled to have welcomed back Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Beautyland and 2011 alumna of The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship program, to celebrate the release of her new collection of short fiction, Exit Zero. Bertino was joined by Vinson Cunningham, staff writer and theatre critic at the New Yorker, and author of Great Expectations.
The twelve stories in Exit Zero showcase Bertino’s unique spin on magical realism and illustrate how all kinds of memento mori—vampires, ghost girls, and more—leave their mark on our world. Don’t miss this conversation between a master of the short story form and one of our most insightful critics about the deep wisdom we can derive from a delightfully haunting story.
Featured Book
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Exit Zero
By Marie-Helene Bertino
Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux
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.
Featuring
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Marie-Helene Bertino
Marie-Helene Bertino
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 The 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.
Photo Credit: William Lyman
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Vinson Cunningham
Vinson Cunningham
Vinson Cunningham joined the New Yorker as a staff writer in 2016. Since 2018, he has served as a critic for the magazine, writing about theatre, television, and more. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2024, and was awarded the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2021-2022. And, in 2020, he was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for his profile of the comedian Tracy Morgan. He teaches at the Yale School of Art and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and is a co-host of Critics at Large, the New Yorker’s weekly podcast about culture and the arts. His debut novel, Great Expectations, came out in 2024.
