Manuel Gonzales
Biography
Manuel Gonzales completed the Columbia University graduate creative writing program. He has published fiction and nonfiction in Open City, Fence, One Story, Esquire, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and The Believer. He is the executive director of the Austin Bat Cave, a nonprofit creative writing center for students ages 6 to 18. The Miniature Wife and Other Stories is his first book. He lives with his wife and two children in Austin.
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The Miniature Wife and Other Stories
Reviews for The Miniature Wife
"These stories are wrought with forceful clarity, Borgesian inventiveness and enchanting, devious wit—an unforgettable debut from a uniquely gifted writer." – Wells Tower, author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
"These are beautiful, strange truths — mad, weird, funny and unforgettable. Manuel Gonzales possesses a brand new American literary voice. This is vital work from an exciting new writer." — Ben Marcus, author of The Flame Alphabet
"This book has everything you could ask for in a collection, and even things you hadn't thought to ask for, but secretly wanted: unicorns, mobsters, swamp monsters and werewolves. Manuel Gonzales weaves the supernatural into the lives of everyday citizens, from anthropologists to airline passengers, and the result is pure magic mixed with humor and deep humanity." – Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief
"You know that feeling you get when you pick up a book and realize you are hearing a voice you have never heard before but will be hearing for a long time? I had that feeling on page 5. Please pick up this book - you will have that feeling. Dark, smart and strange in a way that initially had me grasping for comparison but that ultimately revealed itself to be something new." — Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
"Manuel Gonzales's The Miniature Wife is a marvel—a beautiful, hilarious and moving reinvention of the gothic, a testimony to the sublime powers of the imagination and language. This a book of extraordinary joy, compassion, horror and grace all rolled into one." — Dinaw Mengestu, author of How to Read the Air and The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears
"It's easy to compare Manuel Gonzales to George Saunders, but it would be just as easy to compare him to Borges or Márquez or Aimee Bender…He makes the extraordinary ordinary, and his playfulness is infectious." — Benjamin Percy, Esquire
"Excellent…Gonzales has built a peerless fictional universe by populating his stories with zombies, unicorns, werewolves and space warriors, and then giving them the sensibilities of worried middle managers…hilarious and chilling…a superior collection of writing and a signpost of an emerging talent with a strong and distinctive voice." — Michael Lindgren, the Washington Post
"Lucid and confident...because his prose is never sloppy and his rhythm is impeccable, Gonzales's sentences unfold with an unusual smoothness...these stories showcase an exciting new voice... [they] ring and resound." — Aimee Bender, The New York Times Book Review
"Is there a term for something that's sad, funny, and strange all at once? Sunge? Frad? Because that would describe this imaginative debut…even the most absurd emotional conflicts feel familiar somehow, which only makes them more moving." — Melissa Maerz, Entertainment Weekly
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