JANUARY 2019 - AudioFile
This is a varied collection of short stories, and listeners will benefit from the use of multiple narrators, including Erin Bennett, Allyson Ryan, Mark Bramhall, and Kaleo Griffith, among others. You can sink into these stories while enjoying the range of voices and personas. Bennett and Ryan inhabit angry, dramatic women who are impatient with life and limitations. The male narrators highlight the elements of suspense and borderline horror. They blend together to create a diverse listening journey as you are taken from one story to the next. This title is likely to linger on your device, as the stories are numerous and generous in length. Take your time enjoying the written and oral creativity on display. M.R. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 09/17/2018
Schweblin (Fever Dream) once again deploys a heavy dose of nightmare fuel in this frightening, addictive collection. In “Headlights,” Felicity, a just-married woman whose husband has abandoned her by the side of the road, hears and senses an approaching swarm of jilted women in the pitch black fields around her (“The laughter is closer now; it completely drowns out the crying”). “Preserves” is about a married couple expecting their first child and deciding to alter nature’s course. In the title story, two parents try to figure out what to do about their young daughter, who has started eating live birds. In “Underground,” the children in a small mining town dig a massive hole and suddenly disappear, and when their parents go looking for them, they find the hole filled in—and empty when they dig it up again. “The Heavy Suitcase of Benavides” follows a man who thinks that he has killed his wife and stuffed her in a suitcase. When he visits his doctor to confess, his doctor responds to the news unexpectedly, leading to a startling ending. Schweblin has a knack for leaving things unsaid: by zeroing in on her characters and settings to an uncomfortably close degree and only hinting at what’s at the edges of the perspective, she achieves a constant sense of dread. Schweblin’s stories are canny, provocative, and profoundly unsettling. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
"Schweblin is among the most acclaimed Spanish-language writers of her generation.... [H]er true ancestor could only be David Lynch; her tales are woven out of dread, doubles and confident loose ends.... What makes Schweblin so startling as a writer, however, what makes her rare and important, is that she is impelled not by mere talent or ambition but by vision, and that vision emerges from intense concern with the world, with the hidden cruelties in our relationships with all that is vulnerable — children, rivers, language, one another." —New York Times
"The author’s flair for intertwining surrealism with delicate emotionality is again on full display in Mouthful of Birds, a collection of short stories that sit somewhere between miniature mysteries and fairy tales. In this slim and superb book, Schweblin takes on the desire to love, to parent, and to care for one’s own body—hardly extraordinary themes—and invests them with a fresh poignancy." —Vogue
"Admirers of Schweblin's work will be delighted to learn that she hasn't lost any of the atmospheric creepiness that made Fever Dream such an unsettling ride. Mouthful of Birds, is just as ethereal and bizarre as its predecessor, and it proves that Schweblin is a master of elegant and uncanny fiction.... Schweblin is gifted at treating the otherworldly with a matter-of-fact attitude, writing about the surreal as if it were unremarkable.... And her writing, beautifully translated by Megan McDowell, is consistently perfect; she can evoke more feelings in one sentence than many writers can in a whole story. Fans of literature that looks at the world from a skewed point of view will find much to love in Schweblin's book, and so will anyone who appreciates originality and bold risk-taking. Mouthful of Birds is a stunning achievement from a writer whose potential is beginning to seem limitless." —NPR
“[T]he stories cumulatively summon a world in which the civilized is constantly receding and to be a human is to live in a state of desperation.” —The New Yorker
"Strange and beautiful." —Tommy Orange, The Guardian
"Chilling.... confirm her as a master of the macabre.... [T]his collection of short stories brings to life vivid worlds of terror and unease. Her particular genius lies in the fact that there’s something inherently savage and ungovernable about her work: each of these eerie, shocking stories crouches like a tiny feral beast, luring you in with false promises of docility, only to then sideswipe you with sharpened claws and bared fangs." —Financial Times
"Surreal, disturbing, and decidedly original.” —Library Journal, starred review
"Schweblin once again deploys a heavy dose of nightmare fuel in this frightening, addictive collection…canny, provocative, and profoundly unsettling." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
"The Grimm brothers and Franz Kafka pay a visit to Argentina in Samanta Schweblin’s darkly humorous tales of people who have slipped through cracks or fallen down holes into alternate realities." —JM Coetzee
"The way Schweblin writes is luxurious, and also incredibly direct.... One of the routine pleasures of Schweblin’s storytelling, in both Fever Dream and in these stories, is getting swept up in her mad effects. While each story immerses and orients the reader, it also keeps them guessing.... While Schweblin executes each narrative move with propulsive confidence, as though of course it would not go any other way, it is also impossible to guess where a Schweblin story is going. One of the greatest effects of Schweblin’s writing is the sensation of having a trapdoor kicked open in your own mind — of not knowing this weird space even existed, but of course. There you are." — Los Angeles Review of Books
"Schweblin's imagination seemingly knows no bounds.” —Refinery29
“Like her previous work and her award-nominated novel Fever Dream, Mouthful of Birds blurs the line between what is reality, what is fantasy, and what is madness.” —Bustle
“Schweblin is back with this book of short stories, each more unnerving than the last, and all with the unique ability to leave you with that throbbing, pulsing feeling following an electric shock or a sleepless night or a solid scare or all of the above.” —Nylon
"Schweblin builds dense and uncanny worlds, probing the psychology of human relationships and the ways we perceive existence and interpret culture, with dark humor and sharp teeth. An assemblage of both gauzy and substantial stories from an unquestionably imaginative author." —Kirkus Review
"Intense… [has] a visceral effect as Schweblin navigates the extremes of her characters’ actions and thoughts, both healing and destructive.” —Booklist
“In simple, uncluttered prose, these stories manage to dismantle society’s accepted norms then prompt you wonder how to navigate morality without them and question why we ever accepted them in the first place.” —Broadly
"[E]xplores the delicate line between real life and fantasy to devastating effect.... Each story’s disorienting effect lies in its ability to waver between the concretely real and the hazily unreal. There’s a sense of the paranormal—rather than the magic—at play." —Paste
JANUARY 2019 - AudioFile
This is a varied collection of short stories, and listeners will benefit from the use of multiple narrators, including Erin Bennett, Allyson Ryan, Mark Bramhall, and Kaleo Griffith, among others. You can sink into these stories while enjoying the range of voices and personas. Bennett and Ryan inhabit angry, dramatic women who are impatient with life and limitations. The male narrators highlight the elements of suspense and borderline horror. They blend together to create a diverse listening journey as you are taken from one story to the next. This title is likely to linger on your device, as the stories are numerous and generous in length. Take your time enjoying the written and oral creativity on display. M.R. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2018-10-02
A dark and dreamy collection by Schweblin (Fever Dream, 2017), like an eerie walk through a perpetual twilight of uneasy—and often absurdly funny—states of consciousness and being.
In these 20 swiftly running stories, unimpeachably translated from Spanish by McDowell, Schweblin explores the slippery terrain of the mind's deeper recesses, where anxieties over the limits, or lack thereof, of the possible multiply and mutate. The collection's trenchant first story, "Headlights," begins with a bride realizing she's been abandoned on the side of a highway by her new husband after stopping for a bathroom break, ostensibly because she took too long and "waiting wears [men] out." Here she encounters a field full of jilted, wailing, and vengeful fellow brides in a witty examination of gender allegiances and competition, and dependency and tolerance in romantic relationships. "Preserves" introduces a pregnant woman and her husband who are both unprepared for the rigors of parenthood; they take drastic measures to eliminate the pregnancy but somehow preserve their would-be daughter for when they're ready. In the title story, the limitlessness and obligations of parental love are put to the test by a teenage daughter's curious appetites. And in "Toward a Happy Civilization," in a clever dilation of the idea of never being content where one is, an office worker from the capital plots his escape from the countryside, where he's being held captive by a train station attendant and his wife, who cooks wholesome meals and assigns daily tasks of vigorous outdoor labor to the man and their other office-worker detainees. Though some stories are more desultory than others and may not entirely satisfy, at her best, Schweblin builds dense and uncanny worlds, probing the psychology of human relationships and the ways we perceive existence and interpret culture, with dark humor and sharp teeth.
An assemblage of both gauzy and substantial stories from an unquestionably imaginative author.
