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Seven Stories Press

Works of Radical Imagination

Book cover for Natural Histories
Book cover for Natural Histories

Translated from the Spanish by J. T. Lichtenstein.

In Natural Histories, five dark and delicately written stories unfold in fragile worlds, where animal behaviors parallel the ways in which human beings interact with one another and react to their environments. Siamese fighting fish, cockroaches, a cat, a snake, and a strange fungus are mirrors that reflect the unconfessable aspects of human nature we keep hidden, buried. The traits and fates of these animals illuminate such deeply natural, human experiences as the cruelty born of cohabitation, the desire to reproduce or the struggle against it, and the inexplicable connection that can bind, eerily, two beings together.

In her precise writing, subtle and spellbinding, Guadalupe Nettel renders the ordinary unsettling, and the grotesque exquisite.

In each tale Nettel 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.

Book cover for Natural Histories
Book cover for Natural Histories

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

“The gaze [Nettel] turns on madnesses both temperate and destructive, on manias, on deviances, is so sharp that it has us seeing straight into our own obsessions.”

“These stories are an interesting, arresting study of how their lives mirror our own.”

“The career of this young storyteller is worth keeping an eye on. A master of style, with a marvelous poetic naturalism, her ideas and manners distinguish her from what we are accustomed to in Mexican literature.”

“Seasoned readers will delight in this literary voice, new to the landscape of Latin American literature, a voice sophisticated as it is original.”

“It has been a long time since I've found in the literature of my generation a world as personal and untransferable as that of Guadalupe Nettel.”

“One that stood out for me in particular among these very good books is Natural Histories by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by J. T. Lichtenstein. Nettel is a wonderful Mexican writer, and each of the stories in this slim collection, published by Seven Stories, takes a wry philosophical look at the relationship between people and the creatures they live with – whether a pair of pet fish or an infestation of cockroaches.”

blog — January 31

An Interview with Translator Suzanne Jill Levine

We sat down with writer and master translator Suzanne Jill Levine at the Seven Stories offices to discuss how she became a translator in the first place, her pioneering book The Subversive Scribe, literalism vs. essentialism in translation, and her work translating Seven Stories authors Guadalupe Nettel's forthcoming Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (2020) and Luis Negrón's brilliant, outrageous Mundo Cruel. A verité interview complete with phones ringing, doors closing, and some warm-up chatter in the beginning. Hope you enjoy!

Guadalupe Nettel

The New York Times described GUADALUPE NETTEL's acclaimed English language debut collection, Natural Histories (Seven Stories, 2014), as "five flawless stories." A Bogotá 39 author and Granta "Best Untranslated Writer," Nettel has received numerous prestigious awards, including the 2023 El Grand Balam Literary Prize "for her intimate psychological explorations of individuals marginalized from themselves by an often cruel, inexplicable, and wondrous world," the Gilberto Owen National Literature Prize, the Antonin Artaud Prize, the Ribera del Duero Short Fiction Award, and the 2014 Herralde Novel Prize. Her novel, Still Born (Bloomsbury), was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. In 2015 Seven Stories published her first novel, The Body Where I Was Born. In 2018 her second novel, After the Winter, was published by Coffee House Press. Nettel lives and works in Mexico City.