First Novel Friday: Westward Women, Slow Guillotine, and Every Happiness

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Friday, 6:00 pm EDT March 6, 2026

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

In-person tickets are sold out. Register above to view the livestream.

Members of The Center for Fiction receive free tickets to First Novel Friday and early access to registration. Become a member today. Already a member? RSVP here.

On the first Friday of the month, join us as we celebrate and launch a selection of the best debut novels published today. Be among the first to discover boundary-pushing and world-expanding work from new voices in fiction.

Kick off the weekend with a happy hour at our cash bar for ticket holders in our Members Lounge starting at 6pm. Then, at 7pm, we’ll move to our auditorium for readings from the featured debut novelists, followed by a short moderated conversation. (If auditorium seating reaches capacity, guests will be invited to watch the livestream of the readings and conversation on a large screen in our Members Lounge.) The party continues with book signings and more signature cocktails to round out the night. Go home with something new—a book, a friend, a favorite Friday night tradition.

This month, we are pleased to welcome debut novelists Alice Martin (Westward Women), Teo Rivera-Dundas (Slow Guillotine), and Reena Shah (Every Happiness). March’s novels ask what it means to stay, to leave, and to become someone new—within friendships, families, and the wider world. Megha Majumdar, bestselling author of A Burning, will join us as the evening’s moderator. We hope you’ll support our featured authors by buying their books at the event (purchase all three for 15% off). Space is limited, so reserve your spot today.

We offer two in-person ticket options: the $5 Community Ticket and the $40+ Supporter Ticket. Both provide the same access, but if you’re able, we kindly suggest registering for the Supporter Ticket to help sustain our programs for emerging writers.

Featuring

Alice Martin

Alice Martin

Alice Martin holds a PhD in Literature from Rutgers University. She is an Assistant Professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University, where she teaches fiction writing and American literature. She lives outside of Asheville, North Carolina with her husband, her son, and too many typewriters. Westward Women is her debut novel.

Photo Credit: Emily Anderson
Teo Rivera-Dundas

Teo Rivera-Dundas

Teo Rivera-Dundas is a writer in western Massachusetts. His short fiction has appeared in journals such as Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Meridian, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. His debut novel, Slow Guillotine, is forthcoming March 2026 from the University of Nebraska Press.

Photo Credit: Teo Rivera-Dundas
Reena Shah

Reena Shah

Reena Shah is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her work has been featured in the Masters Review, Electric Literature, Joyland, BBC, the American Prospect, National Geographic, and the Guardian, among other publications. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, Millay Arts, Tin House, Sustainable Arts Foundation, Cuttyhunk Island Residency, and the Fulbright Foundation. She received an MFA in fiction from the Michener Center for Writers, where she won the Keene Prize for Literature. For many years she was a kathak dancer in New York and India. She now lives on Roosevelt Island, NY with her family and teaches in a public school.

Photo Credit: Paisley Media
Megha Majumdar

Megha Majumdar

Megha Majumdar is the author of the novel A Guardian and a Thief, which is an Oprah’s Book Club pick, and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal, and the National Book Award. A Guardian and a Thief is also a New York Times notable book, a Washington Post notable book, and one of the ten best books of the year per the Atlantic and Time magazine. Her first book, the New York Times bestselling novel A Burning, was a Today Show Read With Jenna book club pick and a National Book Award nominee, among other honors. Her work has been supported by the Whiting, Civitella Ranieri, and Hawthornden foundations. Born and raised in Kolkata, India, she now lives in New York.

Photo Credit: Marco Giugliarelli for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation

Featured Books

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Westward Women

By Alice Martin

Published by St. Martin's Press

PURCHASE

It starts with an itch.

In homes across the country, women ages eighteen to thirty-five begin to slow down.

Tired. Blank. Restless.

Drawn to the Pacific Ocean like it’s calling them home. They abandon their lives—jobs, families, their very selves. And once they reach the West, they vanish forever.

At the center of the story are three young women caught in the pull of something unstoppable.

Aimee follows the trail of her missing best friend to a man called the Piper—known for leading infected women West.

Teenie, afflicted and unraveling, clings to a single memory as she looks out the window of the Piper’s van.

And Eve, a former journalist, is chasing the story that might just consume her.

Each on the edge of transformation. Drawn toward the unknown. In search of a way forward.
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Slow Guillotine

By Teo Rivera-Dundas

Published by University of Nebraska Press

PURCHASE

Slow 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.

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Every Happiness

By Reena Shah

Published by Bloomsbury USA

PURCHASE

Deepa and Ruchi are 12 years old when they meet at their Catholic school in India, but their connection is swift and lasting. As the two girls grow up and face their families’ expectations and the limits of their ambitions, their friendship is marked by intimacy, jealousy, and suppressed desire.

When, in their twenties, Deepa marries a doctor and moves from India to the suburbs of Connecticut, Ruchi quickly finds an engineer bound for the same state and follows her friend across the world. But life in the United States is different than either woman expects. Deepa’s daughter seeks affection Deepa refuses to give, and Ruchi’s son resists her smothering care. At the same time, Deepa and Ruchi find their closeness tested by a growing class disparity, competing family needs, and the differences in their desires. Ultimately, when Ruchi discovers a dangerous secret about Deepa’s husband’s wealth, both women are forced to weigh the tangled bonds of their friendship with their lives, and their families’, in the burgeoning Indian American community.

“Moving and unforgettable” (Kimberly King Parsons), Every Happiness explores the slippery edges of a lifelong relationship, and the invisible threads that bind us, sometimes painfully, to those we love most.