Natural Histories Stories

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.

The New York Times described GUADALUPE NETTEL’s acclaimed English-language debut, Natural Histories, as “five flawless stories.” A Bogotá 39 author and Granta “Best Untranslated Writer,” Nettel has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Gilberto Owen National Literature Prize, the Antonin Artaud Prize, the Ribera del Duero Short Fiction Award, and the Anna Seghers Prize. She was short-list for the Neustadt Prize, and most recently, won the 2014 Herralde Novel Prize. The Body Where I Was Born, a novel of an unconventional childhood in the seventies, is her first novel to appear in English. Nick Flynn called it "utterly compelling .... [Nettel] has brilliantly found a form to contain the multitudes of what one body can hold." She lives and works in Mexico City.

The Marriage of the Red Fish  11

War in the Trash Cans  41

Felina  61

Fungus  83

The Snake from Beijing  103