The Natural State of Things

The Natural State of Things

Fiction

Pages 129
Format Paperback
Form Novella
Published 30 September 2026
Language Spanish to English
ISBN 978-1-918688-01-6
£11.99 Buy

About this book

Parading through The Natural State of Things behind unpredictable masks of fiction are the conflicts and anxieties that define us most intimately: violence and rebellion, the anticipation of cataclysm and life lived at its limits; the precarity and the banalisation of art; the end of a relationship and the beginning of decay through decadence; the sickness and the shadow of fear.

 

This collection of short stories is populated by strange beings, such as the man who decides to sell his left hand to an art gallery or the woman who cannot stop laughing, in which Alejandro Morellón disrupts conventional thought and modulates the fantastic with an unmistakeable purpose: to reveal the absurdities of the world, but also the numerous contradictions and its most poetic ruptures.

Though individually complete, each of the eight stories is linked through mirrored allegories and thematic echoes. Yet, the collection’s titular tale narrates the life of a man whose world is quite literally turned upside down after the birth of his son.

 

With his initial publication in Spanish, El estado natural de las cosas, Alejandro Morellón won the fourth Gabriel García Márquez Hispano- American Short Story Prize, the most prestigious award for this genre in the Spanish language. The jury, comprising Alberto Manguel, Roberto Burgos Cantor, Vlady Kociancich, Anne McLean, and Vicente Molina Foix, noted among other things that ‘the metaphor residing in his fantastic plots reflects our everyday concerns with great precision.’

 


Winner of the Gabriel García Márquez Hispano-American Short Story Prize.

 

Translated by J.M. Jakus

  • There are books that can only be written in a state of rapt consciousness. A type of trance that suspends the dispensable accident of our existence, compelling us to dive into the essential qualities that most radically define us. That is how I imagine Alejandro Morellón while writing, immersed in the feverish trance of a novel whose creation would ultimately become an exhausting, almost physical experience.

    Fernando ParraDiari de Tarragona

  • Dreams, guilt, the night, affections, being and the desire to be, memory refuge, silences, evil, clairvoyance, and guilt once more; Morellón traverses all of these emotions, doing so with a poetic style that allows us to live, suffer, accompany, understand and feel the underlying reality of the lives recountedtous.

    Aranzazu MiróLa Opinión de Málaga

  • It was clear to me that the language had to function as a generator of unease in its own right, not merely in relation to the story being told. The protagonist lives in a cloistered space from which he can neither find nor learn how to escape, and to transport the reader there, neither simple narration nor description suffices. The language itself had to contribute to the sense of claustrophobia.

    Pablo BujalanceMálaga Hoy

  • Morellón plays with both extraordinary skill, going so far as to incorporate them into the narrative channels through which the story flows.

    Salvador Gutiérrez SolísDiario de Sevilla

  • A story relayed like a torrent gushing, intimate and wild, carrying a depth of emotional impact only hinted at in the words themselves. It is a story of family, fear, guilt and desire, memory and sex, identity and loss.

    Antonio Javier LópezDiario Sur

  • Have you ever read a story told in just five sentences? The central narrative is sung in precisely that way, in five hits of emotion. Perhaps because the feeling, the emotions awakened are so intense that once the writer begins to express them, he cannot stop.

    El Ojo CríticoRNE

  • Let yourself be guided by the prose, elegant and dark, and ride unbridled towards its stunning conclusion. You might not sleep once you close the book, but what does it matter?

    José TorresEstado Crítico

  • A highly harrowing, existential, and evocative novella.

    David Pérez VegaRevistaparaleer

  • Morellón’s prose moves between the fantastic, the symbolic, the existentialist absurd, and the ominous.

    José María Merino

About the author


Alejandro Morellón is one of the most decorated short story writers of his generation in Spain, whose fiction moves between mysticism and social tension with rare fluency. He is the author of three prize-winning collections: La noche en que caemos (Monteleón Prize, 2012), El estado natural de las cosas (Gabriel García Márquez Hispanic-American Short Story Prize, 2017), and El peor escenario posible (Ignacio Aldecoa Prize, 2022), as well as the novel Caballo sea la noche (Candaya, 2019) and the poetry…