Natural Histories: Stories

Guadalupe Nettel

Jun 2014 · Seven Stories Press

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Siamese fighting fish, cockroaches, cats, a snake, and a strange fungus all serve here as mirrors that reflect the unconfessable aspects of human nature buried within us. The traits and fates of these animals illuminate such deeply natural, human experiences as the cruelty born of cohabitation, the desire to reproduce and the impulse not to, and the inexplicable connection that can bind, eerily, two beings together. Each Nettel tale creates, with tightly wound narrative tension, a space wherein her characters feel excruciatingly human, exploring how the wounds we incur in life manifest themselves within us, clandestinely, irrevocably, both unseen and overtly.

In a precise writing style that is both subtle and spellbinding, Nettel renders the ordinary unsettling, and the grotesque exquisite. Natural Histories is the winner of the 3rd Ribera del Duero International Award for Short Narratives, an important Spanish literature prize.

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One of the most talked-about writers of contemporary Mexican fiction, GUADALUPE NETTEL is a Bogotá 39 author and Granta “Best Untranslated Writer.” Her novels and collections of short stories have received international critical acclaim and won awards in both Europe and Latin America, including the Mexican Gilberto Owen National Literature Prize and the Antonin Artaud Prize. Natural Histories, for which she won the 2013 Ribera del Duero Short Fiction Award, and her novel The Body Where I was Born (Seven Stories Press, 2015) are her first books to be published in English. Nettel lives in Mexico City.