Winter Essentials We Love
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Visit product page →A genre-bending and thought-provoking examination of capitalism and cancer - and recent Brazilian history - based on the author's interviews with his truck driver father.
In What Is Mine, sociologist José Henrique Bortoluci uses interviews with his father, Didi, to retrace the recent history of Brazil and of his family. From the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s, Didi's work as a truck driver took him away from home for long stretches at a time as he crisscrossed the country and participated in huge infrastructure projects including the Trans-Amazonian Highway, a scheme spearheaded by the military dictatorship of the time, undertaken through brutal deforestation.
An observer of history, Didi also recounts the toll his work has taken on his health, from a heart attack in middle age to the cancer that defines his retirement. Bortoluci weaves the history of a nation with that of a man, uncovering parallels between cancer and capitalism - both sustained by expansion, both embodiments of the gospel of growth at any cost' - and tracing the distance that class has placed between him and his father. Influenced byauthors such as Annie Ernaux and Svetlana Alexievich, is a moving, thought-provoking and brilliantly constructed examination of the scars we carry, as people and as countries.José Henrique Bortoluci was born in Jaú in 1984. He has a BA in International Relations and an MA in Social History from the University of São Paulo, as well as an MA and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan, where he lectured and was a Fulbright fellow. He is a professor of Sociology at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo, where his lectures and research revolve around Brazilian politics, social theory, democracy and social movements. Rahul Bery is based in Cardiff, Wales and translates from Spanish and Portuguese to English. His published translations include novels by Vicente Luis Mora, Afonso Cruz, Simone Campos and David Trueba.
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Visit product page →Gonçalo M. Tavares9781628975987 | Paperback Book. April 18, 2025 | 240 pages
Gonçalo M. Tavares was born in Luanda in 1970 and teaches Theory of Science in Lisbon. His work has already received an impressive amount of literary awards, among them the Prix Littéraire Européen, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger 2010, which has so far been given to authors like Salman Rushdie, John Updike, and Philip Roth. Other awards inculde the Saramago Prize, the Prêmio Portugal Telecom de Literatura em Língua Portuguesa, the SPA Author's Prize, the Prêmio Melhor Narrativa Ficcional da SociedadePortuguesa de Autores and the Prémio Literário Fundação Inês de Castro.
Winner of the 2026 Formentor Prize for Literature
Amid a landscape of rubble, skeletal figures, and helplessness in Europe post-World War II, a girl and a man wander among the ruins.
Hanna, a 12-year-old girl with Down's Syndrome, is looking for her father. Marius, her companion, seems to be hiding from something. Aided by a simple instruction card, Hanna explores what it is to be human, as Tavares creates an abstract yet touching portrait of the true victims of war. -
Visit product page →SYNOPSIS: Never-before-seen behind-the-scenes images; Hundreds of photographs from the band's archives; The story and stories told by the musicians themselves; Year by year, a complete chronology of Xutos & Pontapés;
Testimonials and statements from dozens of public figures.
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Visit product page →World—Ana Luísa Amaral’s second collection with New Directions—offers a new exhilarating set of poems that convey wonder, bemusement, and an ever-deepening appreciation of life. Weaving the thread that connects the poem to life, World speaks of our immense human perplexity in the face of everything around us and our oneness with it all. As Amaral notes, all of us, “humans and non-humans, are on the same ontological level, the differences being only a matter of perspective. We are all made of the same stuff as dreams—and stars.” Asked about her thoughts on World, Amaral’s peerless translator Margaret Jull Costa replied: “What I take from this collection of poems is a sense of joy in the ordinary—seeing an ant going about its business, or a bee or a fish, or the feeling of sharing a whole history with a particular table, or watching a very ordinary woman sitting on a train playing with the handle of her handbag. World also brings us meditations on colonization, slavery, and whaling. Like the world, it is full of surprises and full of joy and sadness.” These vibrant, exultant poems invite you to share this marvelous world: Yes, all you need (how easy!) is to say yes.
Language English Print length 144 pages ISBN-10 0811234835 ISBN-13 978-0811234832 -
Visit product page →Life under Brazil’s brutal “cordial racism” comes painfully alive in this novel of fathers and sons.
How do you become the protagonist of your own life? For Pedro, it means searching for himself in the objects his father left behind: the layers that make up his life, and that of his parents, and the circumstances, geographies, and wounds that shaped them all. It’s an archaeology of affections, but also of life in southern Brazil, where being black on the streets of Porto Alegre manifests violences large and small. Where being a young woman, raised by a single mother, may find you seeking security in the untrustworthy arms of men.
In Dark Side of Skin , Jeferson Tenório takes on fathers and sons, Shakespeare and Cervantes, and the inescapable bonds and burdens of family and history in one delicately rendered, painfully precise account of loved ones lost and found.
About the Author
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Visit product page →Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.”
Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller.
Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”
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Visit product page →By the International Booker Prize Shortlisted Author of On Earth As It Is Beneath
Animals go mad and men die (accidentally and not) at a slaughterhouse in an impoverished, isolated corner of Brazil.In a landscape worthy of Cormac McCarthy, the river runs septic with blood. Edgar Wilson makes the sign of the cross on the forehead of a cow, then stuns it with a mallet. He does this over and over again, as the stun operator at Senhor Milo’s slaughterhouse: reliable, responsible, quietly dispatching cows and following orders, wherever that may take him. It’s important to calm the cows, especially now that they seem so unsettled: they have begun to run in panic into walls and over cliffs. Bronco Gil, the foreman, thinks it’s a jaguar or a wild boar. Edgar Wilson has other suspicions. But what is certain is that there is something in this desolate corner of Brazil driving men, and animals, to murder and madness.
About the Author
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Visit product page →An unsettling novel that sets us among an isolated group of men whose bonds break down in ways both hard to comprehend and impossible to look away from
On land where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered, the state built a penal colony in the wilderness, where inmates could be rehabilitated, but never escape. Now, decades later, and having only succeeded in trapping men, not changing them for the better, its operations are winding down.
But in the prison’s waning days, a new horror is unleashed: every full-moon night, the inmates are released, the warden is armed with rifles, and the hunt begins. Every man plans his escape, not knowing if his end will come at the hands of a familiar face, or from the unknown dangers beyond the prison walls.
Ana Paula Maia delivers a bracing vision of our potential for violence, and our collective failure to account for the consequences of our social and political action, or inaction. No crime is committed out of view for this novelist, and her raw, brutal power enlists us all as witnesses.
On Earth As It Is Beneath was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
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Visit product page →The things I’ve learned from taxi drivers would be enough to fill a book. They know a lot: they really do get around. I may know a lot about Antonioni that they don’t know. Or maybe they do even when they don’t. There are various ways of knowing by not-knowing. I know: it happens to me too.
The crônica, a literary genre peculiar to Brazilian newspapers, allows writers (or even soccer stars) to address a wide readership on any theme they like. Chatty, mystical, intimate, flirtatious, and revelatory, Clarice Lispector’s pieces for the Saturday edition of Rio’s leading paper, the Jornal do Brasil, from 1967 to 1973, take the forms of memories, essays, aphorisms, and serialized stories. Endlessly delightful, her insights make one sit up and think, whether about children or social ills or pets or society women or the business of writing or love. This new, large, and beautifully translated volume, Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas presents a new aspect of the great writer—at once off the cuff and spot on.
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Visit product page →A well-written, deeply personal saga that acknowledges the resonance of historical identity, art, and literature in our present lives." --KIRKUS REVIEWS
1570: A street teems with activity in Renaissance Lisbon: boatmen unload passengers as jugglers entertain the crowd and vendors hawk their goods. The crowd is large, and more than half of it is Black. Most are enslaved African people performing an array of duties, but there are free Africans too, and somebody else: a Black knight astride a horse.
Four hundred and fifty years later, novelist and journalist Joaquim Arena stands in a museum, transfixed by the character depicted on this canvas by an anonymous Flemish painter. He doesn't know it yet, but the knight is Joao de S Panasco, a one-time slave who nevertheless became an Afro-Portuguese nobleman. So begins Under Our Skin, a wide-ranging investigation that seeks to know the people of the early African diaspora, and tell their stories.
Arena was born in the tiny state of Cape Verde, a small chain of islands off the West Coast of Africa which were uninhabited before Portugal chose them for a slave-trade post--a place made famous in part by Herman Melville's essay on the nature of Cape Verdeans (known as 'Gees') who were common fixtures on whaling vessels.
With this awareness, Arena creates a hybrid text of travel writing, memoir, and history, filled with portraits of complex and fascinating characters. There is Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of a slave raised a gentlewoman in England; Abraham Petrovitch Gannibal, abducted from Africa as a boy, only to be groomed as a nobleman under Peter the Great; Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, son of a Haitian slave, who became a French general in the Napoleonic Wars; Jacobus Capitein, from Ghana, who studies at a European university only to become a pro-slavery Christian minister in the Netherlands; and Carlos Marcelino -
Visit product page →Author: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen & Jorge de Sena Language: Portuguese,
Este volume reúne a troca epistolar entre Sophia de Mello Breyner e Jorge de Sena, desde o ano que marcou o exílio do escritor no Brasil até à data da sua morte.
O resultado é um impressionante retrato social, histórico e moral do Portugal dos anos 60 e 70.
Retrato de um país perdido. Retrato de «dezoito anos de ausência que poderiam ter sido dezoito anos de convívio, de encontros, conversas, riso comum, aflições e alegrias comunicadas.»English overview
This volume brings together the correspondence between Sophia de Mello Breyner and Jorge de Sena, from the year that marked the writer's exile in Brazil until the date of his death.
The result is an impressive social, historical, and moral portrait of Portugal in the 1960s and 70s.
A portrait of a lost country. A portrait of "eighteen years of absence that could have been eighteen years of companionship, of encounters, conversations, shared laughter, shared anxieties and joys."
Author
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (Oporto, November 6, 1919 – Lisbon, July 2, 2004) was an award-winning Portuguese poet and writer.
Sophia, as she is often referred to in Portugal, was born in Porto to a wealthy aristocratic family. She inherited the surname ‘Andresen’ from her paternal grandfather, a Danish merchant. She received a strict Catholic upbringing, and was to remain a fervent believer until the end of her life. After spending her childhood in Porto she moved to Lisbon, where she attended the Universidade de Lisboa. As a student, she was activelly involved in Catholic movements. Politically, she defended constitutional monarchy and openly criticized Salazar’s dictatorship. In 1946 she married lawyer and politician Francisco Sousa Tavares. They had five children, among whom journalist and best-selling author Miguel Sousa Tavares. After the Carnation Revolution in 1974, she made a brief incursion into politics as an MP for the Socialist Party (centre-left).
Andresen won acclaim as a storyteller with Contos Exemplares (Exemplary Tales),”Histórias da Terra e do Mar” (Stories of Land and Sea), and a number of children’s books – A Menina do Mar (The Sea Girl), O Cavaleiro da Dinamarca (The Danish Knight), A Floresta(The Forest), O Rapaz de Bronze (The Bronze Boy), A Fada Oriana (The Fairy Oriana). She also published several poetry books and anthologies, including: Poesia, Dual, Livro Sexto, Coral, Dia do Mar, No Tempo Dividido, Grades, O Nome das Coisas, As Ilhas, Antologia, Geografia, Navegações, O Búzio de Cós. In 1999 she became the first woman to receive the highest Portuguese award for poetry, the Prémio Camões. She was also awarded the Spanish Premio Reina Sofia in 2003.
“Poetry,” she explained, “is my understanding of the universe, my way of relating to things, my participation in reality, my encounter with voices and images. This is why the poem speaks not of an ideal life but of a concrete one: the angle of a window, the resonance of streets, cities and rooms, the shadow cast by a wall, a sudden face, the silence, distance and brightness of the stars, the night’s breath, the scent of linden and of oregano.” The sea is probably the most central theme in her poetical works. Other recurring themes are Ancient Greece and ideas of freedom and justice.
Jorge de Sens
Jorge de Sena was a prominent Portuguese author born in Lisbon in 1919, known for his significant contributions to literature and his opposition to the authoritarian regime of António de Oliveira Salazar. Raised in a family with a strong emphasis on education, Sena was an early reader and demonstrated a passion for writing from a young age. After initially pursuing a military career, he shifted focus to his literary ambitions, publishing his first collection of poetry in 1942 and becoming a respected literary critic. His opposition to the Salazar regime led him to exile in Brazil after a failed coup attempt in 1959, where he embraced the country's intellectual freedom and continued his writing. Later, Sena moved to the United States, where he taught at the University of Wisconsin and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was recognized for his literary achievements with several prestigious awards, including the Portuguese Order of Infante D. Henrique. Sena's legacy is marked by his dual identity as a Portuguese writer and a significant figure in Brazilian literature, remembered for his advocacy for democracy and artistic expression. He passed away from lung cancer in 1978, leaving behind a rich body of work and a large family.
Idioma: Português Dimensões: 153 x 232 x 14 mm Encadernação: Capa mole Páginas: 208 ISBN: 9789895762507
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