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Caio Fernando Abreu (b. 1948) 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. During the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985), his homoerotic writing was heavily censored and he was soon put on a wanted list, finding refuge in the literary counterculture 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. 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 have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, A Public Space, BOMB, and elsewhere.
Abreu's prose shimmers and always surprises-each story is a small, bright gem. The fearless writing in this beautiful collection deserves a vast English-language readership. - Publishers Weekly, starred review A stark collection of short stories from a Brazilian writer who creates specks of beauty with every stroke of the pen . . . Abreu remarkably captures a feeling that escapes definition, a proximity to death so palpable that the words scream its song. Abreu's prose is still, rich, and full of time lost and time future. A profoundly moving collection on surviving stillness. --Kirkus Reviews Caio Fernando Abreu's Moldy Strawberries introduces one of Brazil's most important and original prose writers to English language readers. Translated with expert nuance and brio by Bruna Dantas Lobato, Abreu's collection depicts the almost forgotten world of 1980s Brazil, a world shaped by military dictatorship, AIDS, and economic crisis, filtered through a rich and multilayered queer sensibility. You will want to add this startling collection to your bookshelf. - John Keene, author of Counternarratives and Annotations Abreu's writing teems with the desperate and dispirited, beatific loners who are propelled by a gravitational hunger for some shred of authenticity or understanding, for intimate correspondence with another. There are monumental truths to be found in each of these stories, drifting amid the queasy weightlessness of oblivion and craving acknowledgement. Moldy Strawberries is an act of unshakeable compassion. - Justin Walls, Bookshop Lending an almost painfully humane eye and ear to his characters, Caio Fernando Abreu constructs scenarios of staggering psychological depth from everyday gestures and occasions. Inevitably, devastatingly, readers are destined to meet themselves in his prismatic prose. -- Lucy Ives, author of Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World Moldy Strawberries gives us an unforgettable portrait of politics and desire as these are written incrementally and achingly in the hearts of Brazilians. Bruna Dantas Lobato's graceful and rhythmically acute translation brings close the loss and longing in Caio Fernando Abreu's profound story sequence. --Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm [Abreu's] writing is at times delirious, arresting and revolutionary, often using fragmentation and the language of dreams to describe the world around him . . . This luminous collection of stories shows him to be one of the most compelling writers of the continent. --Morning Star [Moldy Strawberries] is as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, vaulting existential questions across the page while poking fun at the urge to ask them in the first place, both yearning for and laughing at utopian visions of the past. The strawberry fields of the 1960s and '70s have grown moldy, but, in Abreu's writing, within the mulch lies the promise of the new, a chance to start again. --Rosa Boshier, Hyperallergic [Moldy Strawberries] amplifies the lives of people who were often disregarded or dismissed by a Brazilian society in flux. Its stories vibrate with emotion and honesty, conveyed through distinct voices and strong imagery by a confident and deft writer. --Monica Carter, Foreword Reviews
