Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel presents a framework of comparative literature based on a systemic and empirical approach to the study of the novel and applies that framework to the analysis of key nineteenth-century Brazilian novels. The works under examination were published during the period in which the forms and procedures of the novel were acclimatized as the genre established and consolidated itself in Brazil.
The End centers on five friends in Rio de Janeiro who, nearing the end of their lives, are left with memories—of parties, marriages, divorces, fixations, inhibitions, bad decisions—and the physical indignities of aging. Alvaro lives alone and spends his time going from doctor to doctor and bemoaning the evils of his ex-wife. Silvio is a junkie who can’t give up the excesses of sex and drugs even in his old age. Ribeiro is an athletic beach bum enjoying a prolonged sex life thanks to Viagra. Neto is the square member of the group, a faithful husband until his last days. And Ciro is the Don Juan envied by all—but the first to die, struck down by cancer. For all of them, successful careers, personal revelations, and Zen serenity are out of the question, blocked by a seemingly insurmountable wall of frustrations. Orbiting around them are a priest questioning his vocation and a cast of complicated women, neglected and embattled by these self-involved men. Edgy and wise, this tragicomic debut delves into taboo subjects—death, infidelity, impotence, the difficulties of marriage—with unsentimental honesty, and brings Rio and these characters to life in full color.
Bossa nova is one of the most popular musical genres in the world. Songs such as “The Girl from Ipanema” (the fifth most frequently played song in the world), “The Waters of March,” and “Desafinado” are known around the world. Bossa Nova—a number-one bestseller when originally published in Brazil as Chega de Saudade—is a definitive history of this seductive music. Based on extensive interviews with Antonio Carlos Jobim, Jo+o Gilberto, and all the major musicians and their friends, Bossa Nova explains how a handful of Rio de Janeiro teenagers changed the face of popular culture around the world. Now, in this outstanding translation, the full flavor of Ruy Castro’s wisecracking, chatty Portuguese comes through in a feast of detail. Along the way he introduces a cast of unforgettable characters who turned Gilberto’s singular vision into the sound of a generation.
The Brazilian Northeast has long been a marginalized region with a complex relationship to national identity. It is often portrayed as impoverished, backward, and rebellious, yet traditional and culturally authentic. Brazil is known for its strong national identity, but national identities do not preclude strong regional identities. In Region Out of Place, Courtney J. Campbell examines how groups within the region have asserted their identity, relevance, and uniqueness through interactions that transcend national borders. From migration to labor mobilization, from wartime dating to beauty pageants, from literacy movements to representations of banditry in film, Campbell explores how the development of regional cultural identity is a modern, internationally embedded conversation that circulated among Brazilians of every social class. Part of a region-based nationalism that reflects the anxiety that conflicting desires for modernity, progress, and cultural authenticity provoked in the twentieth century, this identity was forged by residents who continually stepped out of their expected roles, taking their region’s concerns to an international stage.
A Nazi hunter uncovers a fugitive SS doctor’s terrifying plot to create a Fourth Reich in The Boys from Brazil, a riveting techno-thriller from the incomparable master of suspense, Ira Levin. Veteran Nazi hunter Yakov Liebermann finds himself entangled in a web of unimaginable horror when he is tipped off to a sinister conspiracy hatching in the depths of South America: a plan to establish a new, globe-spanning Fourth Reich. Why has Dr. Josef Mengele—Auschwitz’s fiendish “Angel of Death”—tasked a team of former SS men with the slaughter of ninety-four harmless, aging men across the globe? What hidden link binds these men together? What significance could they possibly hold for their pursuers? With the clock ticking, and the future of humanity hanging in the balance, can the ailing Liebermann take on a seemingly unstoppable enemy and alter the course of history? Adapted into the film starring Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier, The Boys from Brazil is a gripping, thought-provoking thriller that explores the depths of human malevolence, and the eternal struggle between good and evil.
In 1850 Rio de Janeiro, Estacio tries to uncover the mysterious past of Helena, his presumed half sister, who has been brought to the family home and with whom he falls in love
In the dream-Brazil of John Updike’s imagining, almost anything is possible if you are young and in love. When Tristão Raposo, a black nineteen-year-old from the Rio slums, and Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, meet on Copacabana Beach, their flight from family and into marriage takes them to the farthest reaches of Brazil’s phantasmagoric western frontier. Privation, violence, captivity, and reversals of fortune afflict them, yet this latter-day Tristan and Iseult cling to the faith that each is the other’s fate for life. Spanning twenty-two years, from the sixties through the eighties, Brazil surprises with its celebration of passion, loyalty, romance, and New World innocence.
Brazil is the first work of fiction to depict five centuries of a great nation's remarkable history, its evolution from colony to kingdom, from empire to modern republic. With a stunning cast of real and fictional characters, the story unfolds in South America, Africa and Europe.Two families dominate this extraordinary novel. The Cavalcantis are among the original settlers and establish the classic Brazilian plantation -- vast, powerful, built with slave labor. The da Silvas represent the second element in both contemporary and historical Brazil: pathfinders and prospectors. For generations, these adventurers have their eyes set on El Dorado, which they ultimately find -- in a coffee fazenda at Sao Paulo.Brazil is an intensely human story -- brutal and violent, tender and passionate. Perilous explorations through the Brazilian wilderness...the perpetual clash of pioneer and native, visionary and fortune hunter, master and slave, zealot and exploiter...the thunder of war on land and sea as European powers and South American nations pursue their territorial conquests...the triumphs and tragedies of a people who built a nation covering half the South American continent...all are here in one spell-binding saga.
