The Accidentals
Stories
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this electrifying collection, Mexican writer Nettel (Still Born) stages sliding door moments for her characters and explores their life-altering consequences. With laser-like precision, the eight stories probe such universal aspects of the human condition as desire, loneliness, and memory. The unnamed narrator of "Life Elsewhere," a Barcelona theater actor, obsesses over a magnificent apartment he'd tried to rent and spies on the couple who landed it instead. The husband turns out to be Xavi Mestre, a former drama school classmate of the narrator's, and disaster ensues as the narrator wheedles his way back into Xavi's life. "The Pink Door" centers on a Faustian bargain made by henpecked retiree Mr. Moncada, who visits a mysterious shop despite his wife's protestations that it looks like a brothel. The proprietor, a strange woman, sells him candy that ignites in him a youthful passion, renewing his desire for his wife. Soon, however, Mr. Moncada's insatiable consumption of the magic candy causes him to forget key details of his life. Other stories reveal the ways in which appearances can be deceiving, as in "Imprinting," which finds the family of a young college student who reconnects with a terminally ill uncle keeping quiet about the reason for their long estrangement. 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.
