Bezoar

Praise

“Nettel’s eye slightly deforms things and gives rise to tension, subtle but persistent, that immerses us in an uncomfortable reality, disquieting, even disturbing—a gaze that illuminates her prose like an alien sun shining down on our world.” —Valeria Luiselli

“Bezoar is a delicate, magnetic carousel. Each story rises into view after the previous one, singular and unsettling, showing us that there is beauty to be found in every defect, and leaving us genuinely astonished at the mesmerising reflections it casts.” —Samanta Schweblin

“The haunting stories in this collection feature characters that inhabit bodies which are strange places, so much so that they lose their human form, or are subjected to macabre investigations or perverse compulsions. Voyeurs, symbiosis, metamorphosis, fluids; the links here are hazy, the relationships with other beings, mutant. Guadalupe Nettel reminds us that there is nothing stranger than existence lived in these containers made of flesh, blood and madness.” —Mariana Enríquez

“I love the work of Guadalupe Nettel, one of Mexico’s greatest living writers. Her fiction is brilliant and original, always suffused with sensuality and strange science—and these stories in Bezoar are among her best.” —Paul Theroux

“[A] pocket bestiary of compulsives and fetishists, from an “olfactionist” who scours restaurant bathrooms for the scent of an elusive woman to a medical photographer aroused by images of patients’ irregular eyelids… Bezoar offers a disconcerting pleasure, akin to the uncanny intimacies of Edgar Allan Poe and Diane Arbus… Bezoar’s narrow, dreamlike attention invites unconscious complicity: caught up in dramas of curiosity and concealment, one forgets, momentarily, that the narrator is a man who interprets toilet-bowl skid marks or a woman who can’t stop eating her own hair. Nettel makes it impossible not to notice the latent voyeurism of short fiction, a genre that fixates, much like a fetish, on fragments of strangers’ inner lives.” —Julian Lucas, Harper’s

“Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories, by Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel, makes its debut in Suzanne Jill Levine’s English translation right on time. These six peculiar tales profile solitude and anti-solitude via disquieting scenarios and rich sensorial illustration, driven by the urge to describe that which misses a name. At a loss for words, we turn to stories… Levine’s [translation] triumphantly navigates the delicate dissonance between words, what they describe, and the character who wields them.” —Lindsay Semel, Women’s Review of Books

“You may have read Guadalupe Nettel in translation before; her lyrical, measured novel After the Winter was a favorite around these parts. Feel like encountering a very different side of this talented writer? As this book’s title suggests, Bezoar takes her work into a more uncanny, disquieting vein.” —Vol.1 Brooklyn