The Body Where I Was Born - Paperback

by Guadalupe Nettel (Author), J. T. Lichtenstein (Translator)

The first novel to appear in English by one of the most talked-about and critically acclaimed writers of new Mexican fiction.

From a psychoanalyst's couch, the narrator looks back on her bizarre childhood. Born with an abnormality in her eye and a family intent on fixing it, she occupies a world without the time and space for innocence. The narrator intimately recalls her younger self--a fierce and discerning girl open to life's pleasures and keen to its ruthless cycle of tragedy.

With raw language and a brilliant sense of humor, both delicate and unafraid, Guadalupe Nettel strings together hard-won, unwieldy memories--taking us from Mexico City to Aix-en-Provence, France, then back home again--to create a portrait of the artist as a young girl. In The Body Where I Was Born, Nettel's artful storytelling transforms experience into inspiration and a new startling perception of reality.

Author Biography

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.