Dear Readers,

We come back to writing from Brazil this year for a moment of betweenness. The World Cup is a year away. The Pope’s July visit came in the wake of the biggest demonstrations in Brazil for twenty years. Granta’s Best of Young Brazilian Novelists list made a splash last year, then sank from view. It’s time for Litro to see where Brazilian writing is at. With the president, culture minister and head of the literary academy all women, yet a persistently machista culture and no sign of change, we really have to ask the women.

We open with a story by Luisa Geisler in which football is the last thing on the narrator’s mind. The tone slides towards the surreal and horrifyingly funny in short pieces by Juliana Frank, Ana Paula Maia and Miriam Mambrini. In Maia’s longer story, ‘Unruly Roger’, ideas of measure versus immoderacy run riot in this distorted mirror to Brazilian society.

There is no shortage of anxiety, even frenzy, behind front doors in this collection, particularly among women who live in tension between different levels of society or between generations. Yet, more contemplative notes are struck by Paloma Vidal and by our three poets. Lastly, in ‘Coexistence’, Carola Saavedra dramatises a woman’s encounter with her own, stubborn fictional creation.

I hope you enjoy them all. Tell us what you think.

Sophie Lewis

Contributing Editor,
Rio de Janeiro

About Sophie Lewis

Sophie Lewis is Litro Contributing Editor in Rio and Guest Editor of Litro #114: Rio. She translates prose from French to English, writes, interviews, travels and tastes wine. She helped to found the BBC National Short Story Award in 2005, while she was a junior editor at Prospect magazine. She set up and managed the Europe office of Dalkey Archive Press in London until 2011. She now lives in Rio de Janeiro and is Editor at Large for the publishing house And Other Stories.

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