Moldy Strawberries: Stories - Paperback

by Caio Abreu (Author), Bruna Lobato (Translator)

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.

Author Biography

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.