Review
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Entropy, “Best of 2017: Best Fiction Books”
“Within the deliberately fractured text, themes echo and time folds and unfolds. A spare, artfully constructed
meditation on loss, both personal and national.” —Kirkus
“Gerber Bicecci’s experimental novel takes a unique approach to topics like debilitating loneliness, political
repression, and epistemological crises.” —Publishers Weekly
“This is a novel to puzzle over as its episodes, which are not chronological, align and create points of reference that
allow readers to decipher Verónica’s story just as she herself does.” —Booklist
“A smart story of love and loss with a clever mix of narrative techniques, Empty Set may be an antidote to the current
climate of despair.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“A wonderfully kaleidoscopic novel—so inventive, thought provoking, and offbeat.” —Chicago Review of Books
“Empty Set is a visceral and lucid story and also an art object.” —Literary Hub
“[A]n experimental mix of prose, diagrams and literary artifacts that is also, somehow, breathlessly plotted.” —Star
Tribune
“Who knew a half-drawn, half-achronological narrative with considerations of time and space and loss and love could be
so fun, so easy to devour?” —Atticus Reviews
“Verónica Gerber writes with a luminous intimacy; her novel is clever, vibrant, moving, profoundly original. Reading it
made me feel as if the world had been rebuilt.” —Francisco Goldman
“Gerber Bicecci's sentences (and MacSweeney's translation) run as clear as spring water and are a joy to take in, from
start to finish.” —Shelf Awareness, starred review
“Empty Set(ES) belongs to the set of Great Fragmentary Novels(GFN), which in turn fits plainly and simply within the set
of Great Novels(GN). Verónica Gerber writes with the modesty and care of those who may seem to belong more to the set of
Visual Artists(VA) than Writers(W)—each fragment is a precious miniature that exudes subtle, melancholy humor.” —Juan
Pablo Villalobos
“I can’t say I’ve ever read anything like it—a novel, sure, but with the spirit (and sometimes the form) of poetry, or
linked short stories, along with drawings and a fascinating epilogue on how it was translated.” —Chicago Review of Books
“The pure pleasure of this book is being inside our heroine Vero’s head: the way she Venns relationships like an
autodentrochonologist, someone who has serious questions about plywood, but also about exile, Argentina, and the kind of
loneliness that accompanies being part of an empty set.” —The Rumpus
“Empty Set is a poignant consideration of displacement, and a haunting search for a set of conditions in which we may
feel whole.”—The Riveter
“Empty Set nails a sharp melancholy.” —Matador Review
“In Empty Set, Verónica Gerber Bicecci has found a seemingly new and fascinating way to tell and show us a vital story
of modern loneliness, exile, and imagination.” —Words Without Borders
“Consistently innovative and heartrendingly reflective, Bicecci provides a satisfying slice-of-life story despite
leaving so much unanswered. . . . Here is a reluctant testament to the fact that beginnings and ends are never as
streamlined as we would like them to be; life is riddled with false starts and false summits, and exists only in the
border lines that must be drawn to become visible.” —Arkansas International
“A subtle narrative wrapped up in a unique reading experience about loneliness, where the short, fragmented text, and
simple, black-and-white drawings echo the subject matter perfectly.” —Remezcla
“An intriguing way of interrogating language.” —Signature Reads
“As she works through the disappearance of her mother, two heartbreaks, and the archives of a revision-obsessed
novelist, Verónica engages in a playful reordering of space on the page: Characters are assigned variables, their
relationships to one another expressed through diagrams and patterns. Sketches related to Verónica’s preoccupations
(including triangles, Venn diagrams, and forests and ice cores as historical archives) are also dispersed throughout the
text as Gerber Bicceci explores the limitations of language and the bittersweet nature of incremental
change.”—Unabridged Bookstore
“How do you render negative space, and if you can accurately describe it, is it really negative? Gerber Bicecci revels
in these quandaries and pushes them through all manner of expression: visual, mathematical, linguistic.” —Full Stop
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About the Author
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Verónica Gerber Bicecci: Verónica Gerber Bicecci is a visual artist who writes. In 2013 she was awarded the third Aura
Estrada prize for literature. She is an editor with Tumbona Ediciones, a publishing cooperative with a catalogue that
explores the intersections between literature and art.
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