You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
None
Twin brothers Omar and Yaqub may share the same features, but they could not be more different from one another. And the possessive love of their mother, Zana, stirs the troubled waters between them even more. After a brutally violent exchange between the young boys, Yaqub, “the good son,” is sent from his home in Brazil to live with relatives in Lebanon, only to return five years later as a virtual stranger to the parents who bore him, his tensions with Omar unchanged. Family secrets engage the reader in this profoundly resonant story about identity, love, loss, deception, and the dissolution of blood ties. Set in the port city of Manaus on the riverbanks of the Amazon, Two Brothers cel...
A magical retelling of the myth of Eldorado, by Brazil's greatest writer. The Enchanted City has inhabited the fevered dreams of many European navigators and consquisitadores, but all have been unable to find it on the map.
Set among a Lebanese immigrant community in the Brazilian port of Manaus, The Brothers is the story of identical twins, Yaqub and Omar, whose mutual jealousy is offset only by their love for their mother. But it is Omar who is the object of Zana's Jocasta-like passion, while her husband, Halim, feels her slipping away from him, as their beautiful daughter, Rania, makes a tragic claim on her brothers' affection. Vivid, exotic, and lushly atmospheric, The Brothers is the story of a family's disintegration, of a changing city and the culture clash between the native-born inhabitants and a new immigrant group, and of the future the next generation will make from the ruins.
When Emilie, the matriarch of a large and unruly family of Lebanese emigrants, is on her deathbed, her granddaughter must return to Manaus and her childhood home to say goodbye. Here, in the heart of the Amazon, she becomes enveloped in memories, as family and friends gather round to tell their own tales. We hear of how Uncle Hanna first left Lebanon for Brazil early in the twentieth century; of Soraya Angela, the illegitimate deaf-mute child whose short life was blighted by fear and prejudice; of Uncle Emir and his solitary walk that ended at the bottom of the river; of Hakim's wranglings with the Arabic language; of the two unnameable, fiery-tongued brothers; of the German photographer and constant friend Dorner, roaming Manaus with his Hasselblad; and at the centre of it all lies Emilie- loving, interfering, luminous.
"The story of a long rebellion and the struggle to understand it. The rebel is Mundo, the embittered offshoot of a family split down the middle. The attempt to understand him falls to Lavo, a hard-working orphan who betters himself under the influence of Mundo's father.However, the symbolic heart of the book lies not so much in Manaus and the final years of a boom produced by the merciless exploitation of the forest, but further down the great river, in Vila Amazonia, the centre of a jute plantation and Mundo's worst nightmare.In his lifelong struggle to escape from his father's dynastic ambitions, Mundo distances himself as much as possible from this dead-centre of the novel, taking the plot to Rio de Janeiro and the effervescent worlds of Berlin and London in the 1970s. This beautiful, mature and bitter novel is the extraordinary result." -- BOOK JACKET.
The saga of a Lebanese immigrant family in Brazil. Set in Manaus, capital of the Amazon state, it features colorful characters building a new life against a background of broken dreams, cultural assimilation and internal family rifts. The novel won Brazil's Jabuti Prize.
A collection of multinational scholarly contributions on various cultural aspects of the Amazon region in the 20th century.
Graciliano Ramos and the Making of Modern Brazil brings updated criticism in English on the work of the prominent Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos (1892–1953), a key figure in understanding the making of modern Brazil. Building on existing literature, this book innovates through chapters that consider issues such as Ramos’s dialogue with literary tradition, his cultural legacy for contemporary writers, and his treatment of racial discrimination and gender inequality through the multifarious, provocative and enduringly fascinating characters he created. The volume also addresses the question of Ramos’s political involvement during the years of the Getulio Vargas government (1930–45), to revisit established readings of the author’s politics. Through close reading of individual works as well as comparative analyses, this volume takes readers into the complexities of modernisation in Brazil, and highlights the writer’s significance for our understanding of Brazil today.
The Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story contains a selection of short stories by the best-known authors in Brazilian literature from the late nineteenth century to the present. With few exceptions, these stories have appeared in English translation, although widely separated in time and often published in obscure journals. Here they are united in a coherent edition representing Brazil's modern, vibrant literature and culture. J.M. Machado de Assis, who first perfected the genre, wrote at least sixty stories considered to be masterpieces of world literature. Ten of his stories are included here, and are accompanied by strong and diverse representations of the contemporary story in B...