White Jacket or The World in a Warship, Herman Melville, Carambaia

Check out the titles highlighted by the former CULTURA!Brasileiros, originally published in 2017 in the series Imperdíveis.

Unmissable Series: Books to Read Now

The Progress of Love

Alice Munro, Translation by Pedro Sette-Câmara. Blue Library, 384 pages

Sixth collection of short stories by the Canadian author. The title story of the book, originally released in 1986, reflects an autobiographical experience. It is about a divorced woman who returns to her parents' house in the countryside and has to deal with a troubled childhood memory.

Alice Munro, The Progress of Love, Blue Library

TRECHO 
“They didn't speak ill. They didn't have the sense to know that something must be wrong. Marietta, however, could never stand men laughing. There were always places she hated to go, let alone enter them, and that was why. Men laughing.”

THE AUTHOR
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, Munro (1931) is considered the “Chekhov of Canada”. She also won the 2009 Man Booker Prize and a three-time Governor General's Award.



A little bit of everything

Ana Luisa Escorel. Gold Over Blue, 220 pages

With a well-kept edition, in hardcover and permeated with illustrations, this small book brings texts written in the last 15 years - from family memories, literary comments and others -, that were in the drawer or that fed the great blog of the same name.

TRECHO 

A Little Bit of Everything, Ana Luisa Escorel, Ouro Sobre Azul

“The Devil was very unmotivated, immersed in an eternal red, in a monochromatic excess that did not stimulate his mental restlessness at all. All the same all the time, not a dot around it that wasn't blood red,

dark red" (The Devil's Fate)

THE AUTHOR
Also designer and founder of Ouro Sobre Azul publishing house, Escorel (1944) won the São Paulo Literature Prize in the novel category, with Glass RingIn 2014.

 

 

White jacket or the World in a Warship

Herman Melville. Translated by Rogério Bettoni. Carambaia, 464 pages

So far unpublished in Brazil, the novel is based on one of Melville's sea voyages, then a 24-year-old sailor. In 1843 he left Honolulu on a US Navy frigate and passed through Rio de Janeiro, where he met Dom Pedro II. The beautiful edition comes with a glossary.

White Jacket or The World in a Warship, Herman Melville, Carambaia

TRECHO 
“In contrast to the luminosity of these barons of Brazil, how paled the golden cords of the barons of our frigate! And compared with the long rapiers of the marquises, the daggers of our cadets from noble families looked like golden nails stuck in their waists.”

THE AUTHOR
Melville (1919-1891) is the author of Moby Dick, released in 1850, and Bartleby the Scribe, originally published in the collection The Piazza TalesIn 1856.

 

 

Ax

Silviano Santiago. Companhia das Letras, 422 pages

A mix of novel, essay and biography, it focuses on the last days of Machado de Assis. A widower, the author of Dom Casmurro witnesses the modernization of Rio de Janeiro at the same time that he has to deal with his own decadence, intensified by severe epileptic seizures.

TRECHO 

Silviano Santiago. Machado, Companhia das Letras

“He rarely talks to friends about the anguished loneliness he goes through and he never demands the sentimental adhesion of the writers who are close to him. He remains an educated, industrious, fine and afflicted man. Distressing for some, as his face became ultra-sensitive to sudden nausea (…)”

THE AUTHOR
in the novel In freedom, Santiago also deals with a Brazilian writer: Graciliano Ramos; is at trip to mexico, writes about Antonin Artaud.

 

The Noise of Time

Julian Barnes. Translated by Léa Viveiros de Castro. Rocco, 176 pages

Celebrated by the Soviet regime as much as he was persecuted, the composer Shostakovich, one of the greatest of the XNUMXth century, receives fine fictional treatment here. Barnes, however, did not put aside historical records such as the anguished Russian musician's own autobiography.

Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time, Rocco

TRECHO 
“As the plane seemed to reach solid layers of air, he tried to focus on the immediate fear: of immolation, of disintegration, instantaneous oblivion. Fear gives rise to other emotions as well; but not the shame. Fear and shame rolled together in her stomach.”

THE AUTHOR
One of the great English authors, Barnes is known for The parrot by Flaubert e The Sense of an End, which won him the Man Booker Prize in 2011.

 

 

Walter Benjamin – A Biography

Bernd Witte. Translation by Romero Freitas. Authentic, 160 pages

Brief record of the history of the German thinker (1892-1940). The style is fluent, but there is density. The author narrates the chronological facts: career, friends, lovers, without losing sight of Benjamin's philosophical dimension, in addition to treating with delicacy the tragic aspect of his life.

TRECHO 

Bernd Witte., Walter Benjamin – A Biography, Translated by Romero Freitas. authentic

“In this precarious situation, your trip to Moscow (…) to visit Asja Lacis, is like an escape forward. Once again (…) the nostalgia for the beloved woman who had brought him closer to Marxism as a living political force produced a rupture.”

THE AUTHOR
President of the Walter Benjamin International Society and professor of Literary Theory, Witte has published several books on German and Jewish authors of the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries.

 

Healing by the Spirit

Stefan Zweig. Translation by Kristina Michaeles. Zahar, 360 pages

In the biographical profiles of Franz Mesmer, a scholar of hypnotism, of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science sect, and especially of Freud, Zweig sought to demonstrate the importance of searching for oneself. The edition brings the unprecedented correspondence between the author and the father of psychoanalysis.

Stefan Zweig, Spirit Healing, Translation by Kristina Michahelles. Zahar,

TRECHO
“The surest measure of all strength is the resistance it can overcome. Thus, the feat of demolition and reconstruction undertaken by Sigmund Freud only reveals itself fully in opposition to the way in which (…) the universe of human impulses was seen before the War”.

THE AUTHOR
75 years ago Zweig killed himself in Petrópolis. His work has been systematically re-edited, which includes Autobiography: Yesterday's World e Unusual Novels.

 

 

CDivergent amnes

Judith Butler. Translated by Rogério Bettoni. Boitempo, 240 pages

An essay in which the author seeks to criticize political Zionism and the violence of the Israeli state through the Jewish intellectual tradition itself. A true ethical impulse, its sources are found in the thought of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Lévinas and Primo Levi.

TRECHO 

Judith Butler, Divergent Paths, Translated by Rogério Bettoni. boitempo

“(…) some aspects of Jewish ethics demand that we distance ourselves from a concern focused only on the vulnerability and destiny of the Jewish people. (…) is a response to claims of otherness and creates a basis for an ethics in dispersion.”

THE AUTHOR
A reference in queer studies, Butler (1956) has several books published in Brazil, such as Gender Issues, Self-Report, War Pictures e Antigone's Cry.


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