Schwebelian is the right way to describe this writer, she has her own haunting, striking, and precise language that lingers on all her readers long after they've read her works. I loved the note from the author at the end of the book that showed how pieces of her own life inspired these stories. I believe I'll never look at cats and bunnies the same way again. Simply brilliant!

Overall this was a solid short story collection. About half of the stories were pretty good and the other half were just fine. I enjoyed the writing a lot and the premises were interesting but half of the stories didn't really keep my attention so I can't give this higher than a three.

Thank you to the publisher for granting me access to an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

What a ride! I was unsure how I felt going into this book, but it touches on so many personal life issues that actually people are going through. It was hard for me to not read in one sitting! Some stories were confusing and hard to follow, but you want to devour them the same because they hook you!

Schweblin is a master class in dark, atmospheric storytelling. The title story of "Mouthful of Birds" and the novella "Fever Dream" are up there with my favorite pieces of writing about parenthood, identity, and the surreal experience of trying to understand the people who you love most in the world.

This collection is just six stories, dealing with grief and memory, and feels like her most cohesive collection yet. "Welcome to the Club," "William in the Window," and "An Eye in the Throat" were incredibly strong, giving us relatable characters struggling with the reality of their lives and what they have lost. Even the story I found the weakest, "A Visit from the Chief," feels like a bookend to the first in the collection—both featuring violent men delivering messages to women who are, I think, more in need of a good afternoon with a friend than anything else, but for whatever reason cannot access that kind of connection. (I could have done without that story, but it has a place!)

Megan McDowell's translation is fluid and masterful, capturing the sinister universe Schweblin revels in building. I've read so many of McDowell's translations now, and I'm always impressed by how deftly she is able to translate the formality of the spoken Spanish into English. Not all translators take the time to place the language into that context. My Spanish, unfortunately, is limited to a failed Duolingo streak (sorry to our little owl friend), but I've read enough translated literature to recognize when a translator is showing the reader when someone is being addressed formally versus telling us with the actual spoken language.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for this ARC, in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for the ebook. These six stories haunt in very unique ways. A woman who claims to be dying calls a friend she hasn’t seen in thirty years to talk about her young son who passed away. Two young girls break into a poet’s house to try and make her stop drinking and write again. A father accidentally leaves his son at a rest station and thinks that an employee at the rest station taunts him for years by calling late at night but never saying a word. These stories get under your skin in the best possible way.