Natural Histories Stories [Paperback]

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 Historiesis the winner of the 3rd Ribera del Duero International Award for Short Narratives, an important Spanish literature prize.The Marriage of the Red Fish  11

War in the Trash Cans  41

Felina  61

Fungus  83

The Snake from Beijing  103 Five flawless stories ... Nettel creates marvelous parallels between the sorrows and follies of her human characters and the creatures they live with. —Carmela Ciuraru,The New York Times

The gaze [Nettel] turns on madnesses both temperate and destructive, on manias, on deviances, is so sharp that it has us seeing straight into our own obsessions. —Xavier Houssain,Le Monde

Guadalupe Nettel is one of the most interesting voices of the new Mexican fiction. —J.A. Masoliver Ródenas,La Vanguardia

Seasoned readers will delight in this literary voice, new to the landscape of Latin American literature, a voice sophisticated as it is original. —Arcadia

Guadalupe Nettel reveals the subliminal beauty within beings of odd behavior and painstakingly examines the intimacies ofl£Á