"Mere Chances collects some of Veronika Simoniti's most singular and strange stories. A linguistic experimentalist in the tradition of Julio Cortaazar, Simoniti populates her tales with homeless and nomadic characters struggling to fashion or to maintain their identities as they cross physical and linguistic borders. Whether compelled to communicate in codes not their own or grappling with the loss of language itself, her characters' struggles to forge stable identities point to the way human language, while fundamental to the formation of the self, is often an unreliable and imperfect tool" --