Natural Histories

In her precise writing, subtle and spellbinding, Nettel renders the ordinary unsettling, and the grotesque exquisite.

In each tale Nettel 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.

These five dark and delicately written stories unfold in fragile worlds, where animal behaviors parallel the ways in which human beings interact with one another and react to their environments. Siamese fighting fish, cockroaches, a cat, a snake, and a strange fungus are mirrors that reflect the unconfessable aspects of human nature we keep hidden, buried. The traits and fates of these animals illuminate such deeply natural, human experiences as the cruelty born of cohabitation, the desire to reproduce or the struggle against it, and the inexplicable connection that can bind, eerily, two beings together.

Guadalupe Nettel (Mexico City, 1973) won the Radio France Internationale Prix de la Meilleure nouvelle en Langue Francaise prize for non-French-speaking countries. For several years she has collaborated with a number of French- and Spanish-language magazines and literary supplements such as Lateral, Letras Libres, Parentesis, La Jornada Semanal, L'atelier du roman, and L'inconvenient. Recently she earned a doctorate in literature from the University of Paris. Her novel The Guest was published simultaneously in Spanish (Anagrama) and French (Actes Sud). Her collection of short stories Petalos (Petals) has been awarded the Gilberto Owen National Book Award and the Antonin Artaud Award for best novel. Her award-winning work has been translated into French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Slovak, and Swedish. She lives in Mexico City.