No Dragons in Paradise (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781962770835)

Vendor: Caio Abreu
Product type: Books
Format: Paperback
$22.00
$22.00
$22.00
Subtotal: $22.00
WR Book House

No Dragons in Paradise

$22.00

No Dragons in Paradise

$22.00
Format: Paperback
Description
Description
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Caio is one of those authors who is picked up by every generation. --Ítalo Moriconi

For Abreu, writing is a form of salvation: from madness, from death, from invisibility, and, especially, from the self. --Bruna Dantas Lobato

The thirteen stories of No Dragons in Paradise are about love. "Love and sex, love and death, love and abandonment, love and joy, love and memory, love and fear, love and madness," Caio Fernando Abreu writes in his epigraph. The stories can be read independently. Stories of a twelve-year-old boy's first, intense crush on a teen named Beatriz, whose allure prompts him to look up the word "starlet" in the dictionary; of a Queen of the Night searching for sex; of a young man visiting his isolated mother; and of a tenderness between two lonely men in the middle of the night, Or read as a novel, as Abreu suggests we might, the stories form a propulsive and psychedelic narrative of shame, longing, passion, and abandonment. His sentences are charted by the stars. Two people fall in love on "a Pisces afternoon," and in a fictionalized Brazilian city, tarot cards, cowrie shells, and pendulums mend a broken heart. A glance between potential lovers is often accompanied by the rasp of Billie Holiday or the honeyed croons of Brazilian bossa nova singer Nara Leão. And spinning, half-dazed, this same pair might take a break from the dance floor to discuss Pessoa and Lispector. For Abreu, life is astonishing, mystical, and arousing. And to love is to read, to listen, and to touch.

Author: Caio Abreu
ISBN-10: 1962770834
ISBN-13: 9781962770835
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Language: English
Published: 02/23/2027
Pages: 210
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.81lbs
By Caio Abreu
By Caio Abreu
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Caio Fernando Abreu (b. 1948, Porto Alegre) was one of the most influential Brazilian writers of the 1970s and 80s, despite his work remaining underrecognized outside of Brazil. The author of 20 books, including 12 story collections and two novels, he has been awarded major literary prizes, including the prestigious Jabuti Prize for Fiction a total of three times. During the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985), his homoerotic writing was heavily censored and he was soon put on a wanted list. He found refuge in the literary counterculture established at the time by like-minded writers and friends Hilda Hilst and Dalton Trevisan and eventually by going into self-exile in Europe. In 1994, while living in France, he tested HIV positive. He died two years later in his hometown. He was 47 years old.

Translator bio:

Bruna Dantas Lobato was born and raised in Natal, Brazil. A graduate of Bennington College, she received her MFA in Fiction from New York University and is currently an Iowa Arts Fellow and MFA candidate in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa. Her stories, essays, and translations from Portuguese have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, A Public Space, BOMB, and elsewhere. She was a 2018 A Public Space Fellow, a 2019 PEN/Heim recipient, and a Yaddo resident. In 2022, she published the first English translation of Abreu with his collection Moldy Strawberries (Archipelago), and in 2024, she published her first novel, The Blue Hours.

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