“Electrifying . . . With laser-like precision, the eight stories probe such universal aspects of the human condition as desire, loneliness, and memory . . . In crisp and striking prose, Nettel mines the complexities of relationships, in which secrets and betrayals have the power to change everything. Readers will be wowed.”

“An unnerving collection of short stories in which the comforting conventions of family life are examined, challenged, and subverted . . . Oscillating between realism and dark fantasy, and impeccably translated by Rosalind Harvey, the stories in The Accidentals are delightful and disturbing, and confirm Nettel as one of the finest Mexican writers of her generation”

“[A] captivating, wise, and uncanny collection . . . Nettel’s magnificent stories acknowledge the frequent inability of people to understand why or why not they establish strong connections with others. This recognition underpins the collection’s nuanced, insightful, and sometimes ironic approach to family, friendship, self-understanding, and the perception of how others succeed or fail in staying true to their and their acquaintances’ tales and where they come from,”

“With a twisty, enveloping plot, the novel poses some of the knottiest questions about freedom, disability, and dependence-all in a language so blunt it burns. ”

“Haunting . . . A heart-racingly intense journey.”

“Blurs the lines between parents and caregivers, between family members and strangers, between mother and not-mother . . . features deep and tumultuous relationships . . . Still Born argues . . . that, at certain moments, it is incumbent upon everyone to presume, to pry, to push your way into the hallway. You don’t have to be a mother-in fact, maybe you shouldn’t be. But you have to do something for whomever you find in, or near, your nest.”

“[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.”

“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.”

“Nettel’s sharp, potent novel depicts how even the briefest relationship can affect the rest of a life.”

“With straightforward, honest prose, Nettel paints a vivid portrait of a girl always just on the edge of community and illustrates the beauty and strength of a mind shaped by hardship. She perfectly captures the awkwardness and insecurities of growing up and the small, strange moments that change us forever.”

“Five flawless stories ... Nettel creates marvelous parallels between the sorrows and follies of her human characters and the creatures they live with.”