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Hilda Hilst (1930–2004) was one of the greatest Brazilian writers of the twentieth century, but her books have languished untranslated, in part because of their formally radical nature. This translation of With My Dog-Eyes brings a crucial work from her oeuvre into English for the first time. With My Dog-Eyes is an account of an unraveling—of sanity, of language . . . After experiencing a vision of what he calls “a clear-cut unhoped-for,” college professor Amós Keres struggles to reconcile himself with his life as a father, a husband, and a member of the university with its “meetings, asskissers, pointless rivalries, gratuitous resentments, jealous talk, megalomanias.” A stunning book by a master of the avant-garde.
This book is the first collection of critical essays on Hilda Hilst (1930-2004) published in English. It brings together a variety of perspectives on one of Latin America’s most inventive and innovative authors. Nine essays by scholars and translators reflect about various aspects of her work, placing it in the context of Brazil and world literature. During her lifetime, Hilst won several major national literary awards and attracted legions of devoted readers. Her writing spanned styles and genres, encompassing poetry, theatre, and experimental fiction. She was also considered to be “a writer’s writer,” and her literary achievements eluded both mainstream acclaim and international recognition. In recent years, Hilst’s books have enjoyed increased visibility in Brazil and beyond. A host of translators (including three contributors to this volume) have finally made some of her masterpieces available in English. This pioneering collection of essays should excite longtime readers and introduce her to a new audience.
A wickedly funny work of depraved genius by one of Brazil’s most radical twentieth-century writers; imagine the Marquis de Sade as written by Clarice Lespecter An electrifying masterpiece by one of modern Brazilian literature’s most significant and controversial writers, Hilda Hilst takes us into the disorder and beauty of a mind restlessly testing its own limits. Every month I ingested the body of God, not in the way one swallows green peas or agrostis, or swallows swords, I ingested the body of God the way people do when they know they are swallowing the More, the All, the Incommensurable, for not believing in finitude I would lose myself in absolute infinity… The Obscene Madame D te...
A grand, perturbing erotic novel in which the wealthy, amoral Karl records his sexual life and search for meaning in letters with a surprising legacy “Maybe all women wonder what men would be like without their posturing, but it seems to me Hilst had more than an inkling...” – Dodie Bellamy This epistolary novel tells the story of Karl, a wealthy, amoral and erudite man who records his daily life in a series of 20 letters to his sister Cordelia. She is cloistered and chaste, but the letters are wildly promiscuous – not just in their explicit sexual content, which have earned the novel the epithet ‘pornographic’, but in their form. Ranging in style and register from modernist frag...
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin. If life is no more than a prolonged flirtation with death, then Hilda Hilst's OF DEATH. MINIMAL ODES is the true account of a lifelong seduction. It is at once both a reverie and reliquary, as the poet imagines and reimagines that most paradoxical moment of disintegration--the corporeal flesh fusing with death's own dark corpus. With a visceral-mystical poetic voice that is as teasingly unrestrained as it is intellectually sublime, Hilst's odes enact a baroque danse macabre, where the poet revels in the incongruities of simultaneously seeking the sacred and profane. Translating the first collection of Hilda Hilst's significant body o...
Fluxo-Floema is a detective novel of sorts--pornographic, scatological, and spiritual--that ultimately references the failure and success of writing. It's about vocabulary, astrology, dramaturgy, science, a story within a story within a story. It's a celestial map to social interaction and the failure of connection, a crafted examination of the distortions of religion and piety. Here we, the reader, visit nonsense, pathos, violence, and the flights of fancy of human coexistence.
A book of essays on dynamic, transgressive 20th century figures and the necessity and perils of translating their work.Hatred of Translation thinks through translation with an emphasis on its disaggregation. These pieces address, sometimes obliquely, often with effrontery, the works of René Char, Hervé Guibert, Hilda Hilst, Danielle Collobert, Frankétienne, Mizoguchi Kenji, Ingeborg Bachmann, Kobayashi Masaki, and Marguerite Duras. Resolutely resistant to anything resembling a theory of a thing, these pieces provoke a persistent commitment to thinking in the place of theorizing. Where the French pensée means both of aphoristic thought and of the pansy, Hatred of Translation seeks a garden in the midst of body such as it is occupied by language.
“Tense, moving, and hilarious . . . [A] dark jewel of a novel.” —Francine Prose, O, The Oprah Magazine Three husbands have left her. I.R.S. agents are whamming on her door. And her beloved cat has gone missing. She's back and forth between Melanie, her secluded Southern town, and L.A., where she has a weakening grasp on her job as a script doctor. Having been sacked by most of the studios and convinced that her dealings with Hollywood have fractured her personality, Money Breton talks to herself nonstop. She glues and hammers and paints every item in her place. She forges loving inscriptions in all her books. Through it all, there is her darling puzzling daughter who lives close by but seems ever beyond reach, and her son, the damaged victim of a violent crime under police protection in New York. While both her children seem to be losing all their battles, Money tries for ways and reasons to keep battling. Why Did I Ever is a book of piercing intellect and belligerent humor. Since its first publication in 2002 it has had a profound impact, not only on Robison’s devoted following, but on the shape of the contemporary novel itself.
The English-language debut of one of Brazil's leading writers of the twentieth century
The Poet's Novel provides a unique entrance to the prose and poetry of many remarkable modern and contemporary poets including: Etel Adnan, Renee Gladman, Langston Hughes, Kevin Killian, Alice Notley, Leslie Scalapino, Jack Spicer, and Jean Toomer, whose approaches to the novel defy conventions of plot, character, setting and action. The contributors, all poets in their own right like, Brian Blanchfield, Brandon Brown, Mónica de la Torre, Cedar Sigo, and C.D. Wright bring a variety of insights, approaches, and writing styles to the subject with creative and often surprising results.