Brazilian Literature

The Lady of Solitude projects a fresh and daring new voice on to the Brazilian literary scene. These transgressive and highly charged erotic stories are all written from a woman's point of view and they offer an unexpected perspective on the world, sex and desire in a changing Brazilian and global context. That is not to say that all of Parisot's characters are strong, emancipated and resolute: they just live in a world where relationships of all kinds have changed. Avowedly a disciple of the famous detective writer Rubem Fonseca, Paula Parisot adds a new and sinister twist to crimes of passion in the big city. Some of the settings are familiar to Fonseca fans: high society salons, favelas, back alleys, and hotels in European capitals. Alternating the register from interior monologue to letters and omniscient narration, Parisot brings to the surface intimate moments as well as exact instants when certain social conventions change, move on or die.

Machado de Assis's first novel visits themes the author developed exquisitely throughout his career including marriage, memory, and perspective. In this insightful translation by Karen Sherwood Sotelino, and with an introduction by José Luiz Passos, the novel reveals the author's early experiment in drawing out psychological and sociological issues of his times. Readers familiar with his mature works will recognize the progression from infatuation, through passion, doubt, and toxic jealousy, as experienced by protagonists Félix and Lívia in 19th century Rio de Janeiro.

After a quarrel, an ageing lawyer leaves his wife and travels from Brasília to the dry, lawless backlands of Brazil's northeastern plateau, where he grew up. He has vague plans to start a new life, to buy a ranch and farm cotton, but unresolved childhood obsessions, fantasies, traumas resurface, threatening to overwhelm his very sense of identity. Consumed with thoughts of revenge against the man who murdered his father when he was only two, he discovers that he may in fact have been the lovechild of his rich godfather-the man who ordered the hit-and may therefore be the half-brother of the girl for whom he harbored an adolescent sexual fixation. In this masterful novel rich in local color, João Almino creates a complex, damaged narrator inexorably dragged down into the vortex of his own treacherous memories.

Complex and hauntingly beautiful, Lygia Fagundes Telles's most acclaimed novel is a journey into the inner lives of three young women, each revealing her secrets and loves, each awaiting a destiny tied to the colorful and violent world of modern Brazil. Sensual and wealthy Lorena dreams of a tryst with a married man. Unhappy Lia burns with a frantic desire to free her imprisoned fiancé. Glamorous Ana Clara, unable to escape her past, falls toward a tragedy of drugs and obsession. Intimate and unforgettable, The Girl in the Photograph creates an extraordinary picture of the wonder and the darkness that come to possess a woman's mind, and stands as one of the greatest novels to come out of Brazil in the late twentieth century.

Isolating these moments in his memory and attempting to analyze them much like a lens, he envisions "a haiku stripped of rhetoric that captures only what is in front of the camera." Yet, deprived of his sight, the photographer now must reconstruct his experiences as a series of affective snapshots, a diary of his emotions as they were frozen on this or that day. The result, then, is not the description of a remembered image, but of the emotional memory the image evokes. João Almino here gives us a trenchant portrait of an artist trying to close the gap between objective vision and sentimental memory, leafing through a catalog of his accomplishments and failures in a violent, artificial, universal city, and trying to reassemble the puzzle that was his life.

Welcome to São Paulo, Brazil, in the not too distant future. Water is scarce, garbage clogs the city, movement is restricted, and the System-sinister, omnipotent, secret-rules its subjects' every moment and thought. Here, middle-aged Souza lives a meaningless life in a world where the future is doomed and all memory of the past is forbidden. A classic novel of "dystopia," looking back to Orwell's 1984 and forward to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, And Still the Earth stands with Loyola Brandão's Zero as one of the author's greatest, and darkest, achievements.

Saga of Brutes draws together three confronting and darkly comic stories: "Between Dog Fights and Hog Slaughter," "The Dirty Work of Others," and "carbo animalis," published in one volume for the first time. Ana Paula Maia's no-holds barred narrative pulls few punches, describing a shocking reality of the lives of the invisible workingmen who, like Atlas, are forced to carry society's burdens. These heroes of vile circumstance-coal miners, firemen, garbage collectors, crematorium workers-are the soot-covered supermen who risk their lives performing difficult and dangerous work for others. But in the end, they, too, amount to nothing but carbo animalis-notwithstanding the impure relation of coal to diamonds. Despite their straightforwardness, Ana Paula Maia's stories are filled with great insight and compassion for the lives of the men who live on the edge of a society built with their own sweat.