Bøker i Brazilian Literature-serien

An apocalyptic noir from the author of Anonymous Celebrity and Zero.

What if a man were so shallow that he couldn't believe his life hadmeaning unless he was loved and desired by millions of people?

Welcome to Sao 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 hope is a lie 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 Brandao's "Zero" as one of the author's greatest, and darkest, achievements.

Featuring ten stories never before translated, dating from 1878 to 1886 (regarded as Joaquim Machado de Assis¿s most radically experimental period), this selection of short fiction by Brazil¿s greatest author ranges in tone from elegiac and philosophical to impishly ironic. Including the author¿s classic essay on world literature¿also appearing in English for the first time¿and with pieces chosen from his vast body of work for their playfulness, pathos, and stylistic subversion, this collection is an ideal introduction to one of world literature¿s greatest talents.¿A prodigy of accomplishment¿deserving of a permanent place in world literature¿ ¿ Susan Sontag¿Everything about Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis seems double. There¿s before and after, domestic and metaphysical, high and low, black and white, erotic and austere, short and long, trapped and free, gentle and cruel, perceived and real. The 200 or so stories he wrote spin out these oppositions into a remarkable variousness.¿¿Peter Robb, Times Literary Supplement¿There is in Machadös prose a playfulness that teases the reader, humor that mocks solemnity and seriousness. He punctures pretentiousness and ridicules received ideas (¿) The range of allusions in his work would have amazed even Nabokov. And as with Nabokov, indeed as with any work of art which gives us what Nabokov calls the shiver between the shoulder blades, what elicits one¿s astonished admiration is not to do with subject matter¿but with that abstract and elusive concept¿which manifests itself in that purely aesthetic thing called style.¿ ¿ Zulfikar Ghose, Context No. 12

Saga of Brutes draws together three confronting and darkly stories: "Between Dog Fights and Pig Slaughter," "The Dirty Work of Others," and "carbo animalis," published in one volume for the first time.

Isolating these moments in his memory and attempting to analyze them much like a lens, he envisions "e;a haiku stripped of rhetoric that captures only what is in front of the camera."e; 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. Joao 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.