"A cumulative portrait of a family is drawn with dark humor and inexhaustible affection...Through a series of digressions that seem to pull from Beckett, Kafka, and entomology, the narrator recounts the life of her mother's brother, passing from a delightfully grotesque focus on his body ("I found that Uncle had indeed escaped through the hole in the toilet") to an expansive and deeply empathetic vision of his past."
–Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture
"Swiss author Gisler's first novel...depict[s] the delicate dance between a peculiar man and the young adults who are forced to handle him. . . . Gisler asks if we can ever really know the people in our families. Perhaps acceptance doesn't require understanding–when Uncle gets in the mud, we pull up our pants legs and join him."
–Kirkus Reviews
"Gisler fills each page with breathless and winding sentences that infectiously convey the narrator's exasperation with Uncle, who acts as a deliciously disgusting foil, spitting when he eats, peeing in bottles, and forever shuffling around the house in dirty sweatpants. It's a cockeyed yet authentic depiction of the relentlessness of family obligations."
–Publishers Weekly
"Wry and funny and rich in strange new forms of discomfort,
About Uncle is a slim volume that cuts deep, revealing the soft ligaments of family relations and letting them gleam under the light."
–Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
"Disquieting, tender, painfully precise, the language of Gisler is a language of embodiment. To read Uncle is to become him."
–Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
"A monstrous little novel for a monstrous little man...An uncle like a screwed-up ogre, someone we'd prefer to avoid as much as we'd like to protect him from a world that wasn't made for him. In a hundred pages cracked to let the light through, Rebecca Gisler delivers a tasty and strangely sweet ode to the wobbly and fragile." –Dominique Fidel, Simple Things
