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Stories
by Guadalupe Nettel
From the International Booker Shortlisted author of Still Born, a powerful collection of stories about characters coping with estrangement, isolation, and the unknown.
Acclaimed for her piercing insights and razor-sharp prose, award winning author Guadalupe Nettel introduces us to eight characters who are each in their own way lost and wandering, struggling to connect with the people around them.
In "Imprinting," Nettel shows us a young woman finding an unexpected affinity with an estranged uncle, whose exile from the family is too deep a secret for his niece to know. She introduces us, in "Life Elsewhere," to a frustrated actor who begins, without realizing it, to take over the life and house of a more successful former colleague. And in "The Torpor," we meet a woman who lives with her children in a dying world where it is better to be asleep than awake.
With her signature bold, stark style of writing that makes her work "a revelation" (Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies), this stunning collection interrogates humanity's struggle to communicate and reveals the universal longing for connection.
"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." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"While probing the fringes of the human condition, Nettel's stories prove to be engrossing and relatable." —Booklist
"Guadalupe Nettel again yet again walks into uncertain terrain with these mysterious stories. There are secrets everywhere, she says, especially in life's most intimate and familiar aspects. The Accidentals never loses its sense of things being out of joint, and Nettel explores these fears with calm and with beauty." —Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
"Slyly inventive and delightfully disquieting, The Accidentals is an incredible story collection filled with worlds both deceptively familiar and wondrously strange. A master of the form, Nettel draws each of her universes with great precision. Each story delivers a deliciously effective and haunting sting you'll remember long afterwards." —Gina Chung, author of Sea Change and Green Frog
"I adored this collection, it spread its roots out within me. Nettel is an extraordinary writer." —Daisy Johnson, Man Booker Prize Shortlisted author of Everything Under and The Hotel
This information about The Accidentals was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Guadalupe Nettel was born in Mexico and grew up between Mexico and France. She is the author of the international award winning novels El huésped [The Guest] (2006), The Body Where I Was Born (2011), After the Winter (2014, Herralde Novel Prize) and Still Born (2020) and four collections of short stories, all published by Anagrama, the most prestigious of all Spanish-language publishing houses. Her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages and has appeared in publications such as Granta, The White Review, El País, the New York Times, La Repubblica and La Stampa. She currently lives in Mexico City where she's the director of the magazine Revista de la Universidad de México.
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