The next day they proceed to destroy each other. Amid vitriolic insults, cruelty and warring egos, their sexual adventure turns into a savage power game. This intense, erotic cult novel by one of Brazil's most infamous modernist writers explores alienation, the desire to dominate and the wish to be dominated.

    The Apprenticeship was a bestseller and, as her biographer Benjamin Moser writes, "This accessible love story surprised many readers. When it came out, an interviewer said: 'I thought The Book of Pleasures was much easier to read than any of your other books. Do you think there’s any basis for that?' Clarice answered: 'There is. I humanized myself, the book reflects that.'”

    It is a tale of virtue." (Prologue)

    Flush with his newfound wealth, Rubiao heads for Rio de Janeiro and plunges headlong into a world where fantasy and reality become increasingly difficult to keep separate. Brilliantly translated by Gregory Rabassa, Quincas Borba is a masterful satire not only on life in Imperial Brazil but the human condition itself.

    Macunaima, first published in Portuguese in 1928, and one of the masterworks of Brazilian literature, is a comic folkloric rhapsody (call it a novel if you really want) about the adventures of a popular hero whose fate is intended to define the national character of Brazil."Inventive, blessedly unsentimental," as Kirkus Reviews has it, and incorporating and interpreting the rich exotic myths and legends of Brazil, Macunaima traces the hero's quest for a magic charm, a gift from the gods, that he lost by transgressing the mores of his culture. Born in the heart of the darkness of the jungle, Macunaima is a complex of contradictory traits (he is, of course, "a hero without a character"), and can at will magically change his age, his race, his geographic location, to suit his purposes and overcome obstacles. Dramatizing aspects of Brazil in transition (multiracial, Indian versus European, rural versus urban life), Macunaima undergoes sometimes hilarious, sometimes grotesque transformations until his final annihilation and apotheosis as the Great Bear constellation in the heavens.

    His long suffering widow Dona Flor devotes herself to her cooking school and her friends, who urge her to remarry. She is soon drawn to a kind pharmacist who is everything Vadinho was not, and is altogether happy to marry him. But after her wedding she finds herself dreaming about her first husband’s amorous attentions; and one evening Vadinho himself appears by her bed, as lusty as ever, to claim his marital rights.

    But then he suddenly leaves the hotel, telling a cab driver he’s an alcoholic headed for detox. After that he hops on an all-night bus headed across Brazil, where he begins to seduce a beautiful American woman. Next he says he’s a soap opera actor, which is a bad idea—it makes the people he’s hitchhiking with want to kill him. Then he impersonates a priest. He travels to yet another town, and this time he knocks on a very wrong door. The man who opens it has him in the crosshairs of a gun—the narrator passes out, and when he awakes something terrible is happening to him . . .Crossing the wanderings of a flâneur with the menacing mystery of a hard-boiled noir, and always leaving the narrator’s identity in flux, Brazilian master João Gilberto Noll ponders how any of us come to possess a sense of who—or what—we are. Published right before his widely acclaimed Quiet Creature on the Corner, Noll’s Atlantic Hotel is one of his best-known and most infamous works.

    On the primitive frontier of desert and mountain in the backwoods of Brazil, fifty-two hundred houses and every man, woman, and child who lived in them had been destroyed. The ten-month-long house-to-house battle, the agony of guerrilla warfare, the bitterness of "scorched earth" retreat was ended. The federal army of Brazil had defeated the religious mystic, the fanatic street preacher, the Messiah to thousands, who had led from December, 1986, to October, 1897, the strangest of all rebellions.Yet Antonio Conselheiro's personal war did not go unsung. Os Sertões—called Brazil's greatest epic—is Euclides da Cunha's searing, moving account of Conselheiro's struggle. It is a valiant cry of protest against oppression of the weak by the strong and a wise and compassionate record of a shocking totalitarian crime perpetrated against a handful of backwoodsmen in a little-known corner of the world.In this brilliant English translation by Samuel Putnam, Rebellion in the Backlands retains its force as a classic contribution to man's understanding of the human spirit and the human struggle.

    The poor orphan Aurélia is devastated when her true love, Fernando, breaks their engagement for the financial rewards of a marriage of convenience to another. But Aurélia unexpectedly inherits a fortune and plans her revenge. Winning marriage to Fernando with a large dowery, she stuns her lover on their wedding night by imposing a marriage of convenience until the dowery is returned. The marriage descends into one of hate more than convenience, until both recognize the errors of their ways.

    It is only now that Guedali is able to revel in memories of glorious times past. Born a centaur--a mythical creature half-horse, half-human--Guedali describes his family's flight from Russia to Brazil at the turn of the century, the shock of his birth, the loving care of his parents and his sisters, the mounting resentment of his brother, and his extraordinary experiences being raised as a Jew. Torn between his deep attachment to his family and his natural instincts to roam wild, Guedali searches for a place where his startling duality is accepted and embraced. He joins a traveling circus, only to be discovered in an intimate encounter with the lion tamer. Guedali finds himself on the run again, and meets his life companion--a centauress. Together they embark on a journey to create a place where the human and the wild can live in peaceful coexistence.

    This family’s downfall, peppered by stories of decadence, adultery, incest, and madness, is related through a variety of narrative devices, including letters, diaries, memoirs, statements, confessions, and accounts penned by the various characters.Lúcio Cardoso (1912–1968) turned away from the social realism fashionable in 1930s Brazil and opened the doors of Brazilian literature to introspective works such as those of Clarice Lispector—his greatest follower and admirer.Margaret Jull Costa has translated dozens of works from both Spanish and Portuguese, including books by Javier Marías and José Saramago. Her translations have received numerous awards, including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2014 she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.Robin Patterson was mentored by Margaret Jull Costa, and has translated Our Musseque by José Luandino Vieira.

    Years later, he relives the episode as he examines the mistakes of his past and struggles for forgiveness. His father, who has Alzheimer’s, obsessively records every memory that comes to mind, and his grandfather, who survived Auschwitz, fills notebook after notebook with the false memories of someone desperate to forget.This powerful novel centered on guilt and the complicated legacy of history asks provocative questions about what it means to be Jewish in the twenty-first century.

    

    Álvaro lives alone and bemoans the evils of his ex-wife. Sílvio can’t give up the excesses of sex and drugs. Ribeiro is a vain, Viagra-abusing beach bum. Neto is the square, a faithful husband until the end. Ciro is the Don Juan envied by all—but the first to die. Cutting in on these swan songs are the testimonies of those the men seduced, cheated, loved, and abandoned: their wives and children. Edgy, funny, and wise, The End is a candid tropical tragicomedy and an epitaph for a lost generation of machos.

    The writing soon becomes an exploration of her family’s legacy of displacement in Europe, told in several narrative strands. Sifting through family stories — her grandfather’s migration from Turkey to Brazil, her parents’ exile in Portugal under the Brazilian military dictatorship, her mother’s death, and her own love affair with a violent man — she traces her family’s history in a journey to make sense of the past and to understand her place in it.With an epic sweep of time and place — traversing Brazil, Turkey, and Portugal — this is a profoundly moving portrait of a young woman finding her way back into life. Spare, heartfelt, and evocative, The House in Smyrna is an unforgettable story from one of the most accomplished and original new voices in Brazil.