An Entropy Best Fiction Book of 2017
“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.”
—The Los Angeles Review of Books
“A wonderfully kaleidoscopic novel—so inventive, thought provoking, and offbeat.”
—The Chicago Review of Books
“Empty Set is a visceral and lucid story and also an art object.”
—Literary Hub
“Within the deliberately fractured text, themes echo and time folds and unfolds. A spare, artfully constructed meditation on loss, both personal and national.”
—Kirkus
“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
“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
“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.”
—Arkansas International
“Sprinkled throughout with diagrams representing Veronica's relationship to the people and universe around her, Empty Set is a hypnotic portrait of a young woman adrift, but always searching for a new way to express her reality.”
—MPR’s The Thread
“[A]n experimental mix of prose, diagrams and literary artifacts that is also, somehow, breathlessly plotted.”
—The Star Tribune
“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
