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Torto Arado (2019)
9.7/10on Open Library
Published
Crooked Plow. Two sisters find a knife under their grandmother’s bed, and the injury that follows binds their lives together on a farm in rural Bahia. Choose this novel for the way family intimacy, spiritual life, and the struggle over land grow from that opening scene. Translated by Johnny Lorenz.
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The Head of the Saint (2014)
Published
Fourteen-year-old Samuel takes refuge inside the unfinished statue of a saint, where voices drift through the hollow concrete head. This young-adult novel is a good starting point for a short, playful book about a town that suddenly has reason to believe in miracles. Translated by Daniel Hahn.
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The Words That Remain (2024)
Published
Raimundo has kept the letter Cícero sent him as a young man, but decades pass before he learns to read it. Choose this novel for the weight a few written words can carry when poverty and early work have closed off schooling, and love had to be hidden. Translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato.
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Dark Side of Skin (2024)
Published
The Dark Side of Skin. In Porto Alegre, Pedro turns to the objects his father left behind to make sense of his parents’ lives and his own. Read this novel for a son’s act of reconstruction and the small and large ways racism shaped his father’s life. Translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato.
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Of Cattle and Men (2023)
Published
In a remote slaughterhouse, Edgar Wilson takes care to calm the cattle before stunning them. Start here for a grim, spare novel about repetitive work and a man whose attention to the animals gives him reason to question what’s happening around him. Translated by Zoë Perry.
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Free City (2013)
Published
A blog about the early years of Brasília draws comments from readers who have their own reasons for telling the city’s story differently. Choose this novel if you want to see the making of a capital through arguments over who gets credit and whose memory counts. Translated by Rhett McNeil.
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Banzeiro Okoto (2023)
Published
Journalist Eliane Brum moves from São Paulo to Altamira, where a vast dam changed life along the Xingu River. Read this blend of reportage and memoir for its attention to the people Brum meets and the assumptions she has to reconsider in her new home. Translated by Diane Whitty.
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Macunaima (2023)
Published
A shapeshifter and his brothers leave their Amazon home in a novel that lets folk tales and several centuries crowd onto the same page. Choose it for a funny, unruly modernist epic. Katrina Dodson’s translation includes extensive notes if you want to follow the sources and wordplay.
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Child of the Dark (2003)
Published
In this diary from 1950s São Paulo, Carolina Maria de Jesus writes on salvaged paper while collecting recyclables to feed her children. Choose it for the direct account of the work it takes to get through a day and the observations she makes in the time she finds to write. Translated by David St. Clair.
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Dona Flor e seus dais maridos (1966)
8.4/10on Open Library
Published
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. A cooking teacher in Salvador remarries after her husband dies during Carnival. His ghost has plans of its own. Pick this novel for a long comic read with recipes, gossip, desire, and the kind of complications that only a household with a ghost could have. Translated by Harriet de Onís.
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The Sun on My Head (2019)
Published
Start this collection with “Lil Spin,” where teenagers from a Rio favela try to spend a hot day at the beach. The narrator’s quick, slang-rich voice makes even finding the fare part of the adventure and lets you hear how differently the boys speak among themselves. Translated by Julia Sanches.
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The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (2020)
Published
Brás Cubas gives himself all the freedom of a man who can tell his story from the grave. His failed ambitions and fickle romances come in very short chapters. Choose Flora Thomson-DeVeaux’s translation for a darkly funny classic with notes that put the narrator’s jokes and privileges in context.
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Occupation (2021)
Published
Sebastián talks with refugees occupying a building in downtown São Paulo while his father is ill and his wife is pregnant. Pick this short novel for its shifting sense of what it means to inhabit a place, depend on other people, and feel welcome. Translated by Daniel Hahn.
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A Hora da Estrela (1977)
7.9/10on Open Library
Published
The Hour of the Star. Macabéa, a young migrant from Brazil’s Northeast, scrapes by as a typist in Rio. Her intrusive narrator, Rodrigo, keeps drawing attention to his role in the telling. Choose this short novel if you like books that make you think about who gets to tell another person’s story. Translated by Benjamin Moser.
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Ideias para Adiar o Fim do Mundo (2019)
Published
Ideas to Postpone the End of the World. Writing from an Indigenous perspective rooted in the Krenak homelands along the Doce River, Ailton Krenak asks how humans came to imagine themselves separate from the rest of nature. Choose these short nonfiction pieces for a compact argument about what that assumption costs. Translated by Anthony Doyle.
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Poncia Vicencio (2007)
Published
Ponciá leaves the place where her ancestors were enslaved and tries to make a life in the city. In her solitude she keeps returning to the puzzle of her grandfather’s legacy. Pick this short novel for the way voices and memories from home shape her sense of the present. Translated by Paloma Martinez-Cruz.
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The women of Tijucopapo = (1994)
Published
The Women of Tijucopapo. Rísia walks toward Tijucopapo, the fictional birthplace of her mother, which evokes a real place in Pernambuco. Choose this short novel for the anger in Rísia’s voice and the way memories keep interrupting her journey. Translated by Irene Matthews.
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The House in Smyrna (2015)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
A grandfather’s key sends a woman in Rio in search of the house where he grew up in Turkey. Pick this novel for its braided family stories, from his migration to Brazil to her parents’ exile in Portugal under the Brazilian dictatorship. Translated by Alison Entrekin.
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The Centaur in the Garden (THE AMERICAS) (1987)
Published
A Jewish immigrant family in rural Rio Grande do Sul has a child who is half human and half horse. Read this novel for the strange logic of a fable applied to ordinary family life and to the efforts of its hero to find a place for himself. Translated by Margaret A. Neves.
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