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. - Xavier Houssin, Le Monde

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. - Juan Gabriel Vasquez

These five dark and delicately written stories unfold in fragile worlds, where animal behaviors parallel the ways in which human beings interact.

Siamese fighting fish, cockroaches, a cat, a snake, and a strange fungus become mirrors that reflect the unconfessable aspects of human nature. In each tale, Nettel creates, with tightly wound narrative tension, a space wherein her characters explore how the wounds we incur in life manifest themselves, clandestinely, irrevocably. In writing that is precise, subtle, and spellbinding, Nettel renders the ordinary unsettling, and the unsettling extraordinary.