Moldy Strawberries - Stories

"In eighteen exhilarating stories, Caio Fernando Abreu navigates a Brazil transformed by the AIDS epidemic and stifling military dictatorship of the 80s. Tenderly suspended between fear and longing, Abreu's characters grasp for connection. A man speckled with Carnival glitter crosses a crowded dance floor and seeks the warmth and beauty of another body. A budding office friendship between two young men turns into a surprising love, "a strange and secret harmony." One man desires another but fears a clumsy word or gesture might tear their complot to pieces. After so many precarious offerings - a salvaged cigarette, a knock on the door from within the downpour of a dream, or a tight-lipped smile - Abreu's schemes explode and implode. Junkies, failed revolutionaries, poets, and conflicted artists face threats at every turn. But, inwardly ferocious and secretly resilient, they heal. For Caio Fernando Abreu there is beauty on the horizon, mingled with luminous memory and decay"--

About the author

Caio Fernando Abreu

Summary

Caio Fernando Abreu is one of those authors who is picked up by every generation...

In these surreal and gripping stories about desire, tyranny, fear, and love, one of Brazil’s greatest queer writers appears in English for the first time

In 18 daring, scheming stories filled with tension and intimacy, Caio Fernando Abreu navigates a Brazil transformed by the AIDS epidemic and stifling military dictatorship of the 80s.

Tenderly suspended between fear and longing, Abreu’s characters grasp for connection:

• A man speckled with Carnival glitter crosses a crowded dance floor and seeks the warmth and beauty of another body.

• A budding office friendship between two young men turns into a surprising love, “a strange and secret harmony." One man desires another but fears a clumsy word or gesture might tear their plot to pieces.

Abreu writes the stories of people whose intimate lives are on the verge of imploding at all times. Even simple gestures—a salvaged cigarette, a knock on the door from the hazy downpour of a dream, a tight-lipped smile—are precarious offerings. Junkies, failed revolutionaries, poets, and conflicted artists face threats at every turn. But, inwardly ferocious and secretly resilient, they heal.

In these stories there is luminous memory and decay, and beauty on the horizon.

Translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato, currently an Iowa Arts Fellow and MFA candidate in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa.

Additional text

"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

"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

Product details

• Authors: Caio Abreu, Bruna Lobato
• Assisted by: Bruna Lobato (Translation)
• Publisher: Steerforth press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 14.06.2022
• EAN: 9781953861207
• ISBN: 978-1-953861-20-7
• No. of pages: 200
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 165 mm x 13 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature