Natural Histories

Natural Histories

Natural Histories

Natural Histories

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Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781609805524
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Publication date: 06/10/2014
Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format: eBook
Pages: 128
File size: 4 MB

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

I’ve been a biology professor at the Universidad de Valle de México for over ten years. I specialize in insects. Some people in my field of research have pointed out to me that when I’m in the laboratory or lecture hall I almost always keep to the corners of the room. It’s like when I’m walking along a street; I feel safer if I’m near a wall. Though I can’t explain exactly why, I’ve begun to think it’s a habit born of the depths of my nature. My fascination for insects emerged at a young age, when I was about eleven and passing from childhood into adolescence. My parents had recently split up, and as neither one of them was psychologically sound enough to be responsible for the mistake they had engendered together, they decided to send me to live with my mom’s older sister, my aunt Claudine, who had managed to build a functional family with two disciplined, tidy, and studious sons. I knew their house well. It was part of a middle-class housing complex with American dreams, as my dad would say. Very different from the place where I’d been born and had spent eleven long years. My house and my aunt’s were opposite in every way. . . .

Table of Contents

The Marriage of the Red Fish  11

War in the Trash Cans  41

Felina  61

Fungus  83

The Snake from Beijing  103
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