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About the author
Fernanda Torres was born in 1965 in Rio de Janeiro. The daughter of actors, she was raised backstage. Fernanda has built a solid career as an actress and dedicated herself equally to film, theater, and TV since she was 13 years old, and has received many awards, including Best Actress at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. Over the last twenty years, she has written and collaborated on film scripts and adaptations for theater. She began to write regularly for newspapers and magazines in 2007 and is now a columnist for the newspaper Folha de São Paulo and the magazine Veja-Rio and contributes to the magazine Piauí. Her debut novel, The End, has sold more than 200,000 copies in Brazil. Glory and its Litany of Horrors is her second novel.
About the translator
Eric M. B. Becker is a writer, literary translator, and editor of Words without Borders. He is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Commission, and the Louis Armstrong House Museum. In 2014, he earned a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of a collection of short stories from the Portuguese by Neustadt Prize for International Literature winner and 2015 Man Booker International Finalist Mia Couto.. He has also published translations of numerous writers from Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Literary Hub, Freeman’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other publications. He has served on the juries of the ALTA National Translation Award and the PEN Translation Prize.
Book Details
Paperback ISBN: 9781632061126 • $17.99
eBook ISBN: 9781632061133
Publication date: Jul 23, 2019
5" x 7.125" • 240 pages
Territory: World English
This book is published with the support of the Ministry of Citizenship | Fundação Biblioteca Nacional.
Praise
“Brazilian actress Torres follows the frenetic collapse of an actor’s career and his masculine bluster with piercing humor in her latest (after The End).... Torres’s zippy momentum still leaves space for an emotional coda, and she has an impressive knack for showing Mario’s vulnerability. This resonant story of an actor’s accelerating decline will charm readers who enjoy madcap farce.”
—Publishers Weekly, Pick of the Week
“This clever novel probes the conflict between business and artistry by chronicling the troubles of Mario Cardoso, a famous Brazilian actor past his prime.... Throughout, Cardoso’s voice remains a blend of cynicism and delusion, with the occasional insight: ‘What I lacked was the dignity to wear a crown, none of us have it.’”
“Before she became a bestselling author, Fernanda Torres was a celebrated actress in Brazil. In this, her second novel, she centers an actor who falls from grace after a disastrous performance as King Lear. This is a witty, satirical look at acting as art and its corruption by capitalism.”
—Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine
“Brazilian actor Fernanda Torres writes about what she knows, while writer, editor and translator Eric M.B. Becker provides English-language audiences ready access to Torres's affecting performance on the page. Having alchemized theater into her standout debut, The End, Torres returns with another tragicomedy about the cost of "this bind they call fame"--the irresistible lure, the blinding reception, the fickle adoration and the unrelenting need for reinventions.”
—Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness
“Torres’s experience as an actress takes center stage in her prose as sentences and action flow seamlessly, carrying the reader along on the edge of their seat…. Eric M. B. Becker’s translation wonderfully represents the Brazilian text, engaging with Brazilian culture, discourse, and history in English…. Exceptional.”
—Clayton McKee, Asymptote
By Fernanda Torres
Translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin
Winner of the Jabuti Prize for Best Brazilian Book Published Abroad
In this deadly-funny debut novel by renowned Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres, five macho friends in Rio’s Copacabana reflect on their hedonistic glory days—now supplanted by the indignities of aging—in what turn out to be their final moments.
With uncanny insight into the less virtuous corners of the male psyche, Fernanda Torres brings us five friends who once milked the high life of Rio’s Bossa Nova age and are now left with memories—parties, marriages, divorces, fixations, inhibitions, bad decisions—and the grim realities of getting old. Álvaro lives alone and bemoans the evils of his ex-wife. Sílvio can’t give up the excesses of sex and drugs. Ribeiro is a vain, Viagra-abusing beach bum. Neto is the square, a faithful husband until the end. Ciro is the Don Juan envied by all—but the first to die. Cutting in on these swan songs are the testimonies of those the men seduced, cheated, loved, and abandoned: their wives and children. Edgy, funny, and wise, The End is a candid tropical tragicomedy and an epitaph for a lost generation of machos.