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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.
Fiction. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Portugese by Elizabeth Jackson. In THE FIVE SEASONS OF LOVE, acclaimed Brazilian writer Joao Almino presents a compelling and sympathetic portrait of a woman whose life has not turned out as she anticipated, and whose once audacious dreams have been replaced by half-truths, failures, and frustration. To fulfill a pact made during her student days, fifty-five-year-old Ana Kauffman plans a party to celebrate the new millennium. As old friends resurface and the countdown to the new century draws near, Ana's past undergoes a series of unexpected revisions--beginning with the arrival of Berta, the newly minted post-op persona of Ana's former boyfriend Norberto. Set amidst the chaos of contemporary Brasilia, a place where even the most basic human affairs--love, friendship, sex, and work--can take unlikely shapes, Ana's story is both relentlessly modern and profoundly timeless. Winner of the Casa de las Americas 2003 Literary Award, THE FIVE SEASONS OF LOVE is an extraordinary novel by a writer at the height of his powers.
Free City is master storyteller João Almino's third novel to focus on the city of Brasília, the social swirl of its early years, when contractors, corporate profiteers, idealists, politicians, mystical sects, and even celebrities mingled—including Aldous Huxley, Fidel Castro, Andre Malraux, John Dos Passos, Elizabeth Bishop, and many others. Putting past and present into direct conflict, the story takes the form of a blog, even incorporating comments from other bloggers, each with their vested interests, each with new reasons for spinning fictions of their own.
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.
John French analyzes the emergence of the Brazilian system of politics and labor relations between 1900 and 1953 in the industrial municipalities of Santo Andre, Sao Bernardo do Campo, and Sao Caetano do Sul. These municipalities, which constitute the so-
The first book-length study of why the Beats were so fascinated by Mexico and how they represented its landscape, history, and mystical practices in their work, this volume examines such canonical figures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, and Ferlinghetti, as well as lesser-known female Beat writers like Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger.
Directory of foreign diplomatic officers in Washington.
Although Brazil and the United States have long regarded each other sympathetically, relations between the two countries have been adversely affected by geographical distance, language barriers, and cultural indifference. In this comprehensive overview, Joseph Smith examines the history of Brazil-U.S. relations from the early nineteenth century to the present day. With the exception of commerce, notably the coffee trade, there was relatively little contact between the countries during the nineteenth century. A convergence of national interests took place during the first decade of the twentieth century and was exemplified in Brazil's strategy of "approximating" its foreign policy to that pur...