When an unemployed poet finds himself thrown in jail after raping his neighbor, his time in the slammer is mysteriously cut short when he’s abruptly taken to a new home a countryside manor where his every need seen to. All that’s required of him is to . . . write poetry. Just who are his captors, Kurt and Otávio? What of the alluring maid, Amália, and her charge, a woman with cancer named Gerda? And, most alarmingly of all, why does Kurt suddenly appear to be aging so much faster than he should? Reminiscent of the films of David Lynch, and written in João Gilberto Noll’s distinctive postmodern style a strange world of surfaces seemingly without rational cause and effect Quiet Creature on the Corner is the English-language debut of one of Brazil’s most popular and celebrated authors. Written during Brazil’s transition from military dictatorship to democracy and capturing the disjointed feel of that rapidly changing world Quiet Creature is mysterious and abrupt, pivoting on choices that feel both arbitrary and inevitable. Like Kazuo Ishiguro, Noll takes us deep into the mind of person who’s always missing a few crucial pieces of information. Is he moving toward an answer to why these people have taken him from jail, or is he just as lost as ever?

Quiet Creature on the Corner

Literature & Fiction

Noll, João Gilberto

Literary

Two Lines Press

Just who is the narrator of João Gilberto Noll’s dark and mysterious Atlantic Hotel? First he books a room where a murder has just occurred, claiming he's just arrived from the airport. But then he suddenly leaves the hotel, telling a cab driver he’s an alcoholic headed for detox. After that he hops on an all-night bus headed across Brazil, where he begins to seduce a beautiful American woman. Next he says he’s a soap opera actor, which is a bad ideait makes the people he’s hitchhiking with want to kill him. Then he impersonates a priest. He travels to yet another town, and this time he knocks on a very wrong door. The man who opens it has him in the crosshairs of a gunthe narrator passes out, and when he awakes something terrible is happening to him . . . Crossing the wanderings of a flâneur with the menacing mystery of a hard-boiled noir, and always leaving the narrator’s identity in flux, Brazilian master João Gilberto Noll ponders how any of us come to possess a sense of whoor whatwe are. Published right before his widely acclaimed Quiet Creature on the Corner, Noll’s Atlantic Hotel is one of his best-known and most infamous works.

Atlantic Hotel

As Lord begins, a Brazilian author is arriving at London’s Heathrow airport for reasons he doesn’t fully understand. Only aware that he has been invited to take part in a mysterious mission, the Brazilian starts to churn with anxiety. Torn between returning home and continuing boldly forward, he becomes absorbed by fears: What if the Englishman who invited him here proves malign? Maybe he won’t show up? Or maybe he’ll leave the Brazilian lost and adrift in London, with no money or place to stay? Ever more confused and enmeshed in a reality of his own making, the Brazilian wanders more and more through London’s immigrant Hackney neighborhood, losing his memory, adopting strange behaviors, experiencing surreal sexual encounters, and developing a powerful fear of ever seeing himself reflected in a mirror. A novel about the unsettling space between identities, and a disturbing portrait of dementia from the inside out, Lord constructs an altogether original story out of the ways we search for new versions of ourselves. With jaw-dropping scenes and sensual, at times grotesque images, renowned Brazilian author João Gilberto Noll grants us stunning new visions of our own personalities and the profound transformations that overtake us throughout life.

Lord

"Noll is a hero of Brazilian literature who deserves to be widely known in the English-speaking world and this fascinating shape-shifting novel is a wonderful introduction to his work." --Jenny Offill, author ofWeather Like an Edenic Adam birthed from the clay, our narrator rises to his feet from the muck--reborn, or something like that. Unbeknownst to him, he's on a desperate search for Harmada, the capital city of an unnamed nation and the land of his former glory. Told using Noll's characteristic fragmented logic and spirited prose,Harmada traces the life of this nameless man on a voyage that takes him from aimless outcast to revered director of avant-garde theater, from asylum patient to father to God, conjuring along the way essential questions about the power of art and storytelling, the vanity of glory, and the meaning of freedom. A mythic tale of art and displacement nimbly translated from Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto,Harmada serves as yet another reminder of João Gilberto Noll's sublime literary power: generous in its mystery; earthbound in its essential urges; and entirely unpredictable.

Harmada

For the first time, and against the backdrop of Bolsonaro's emboldened far-right regime, Brazil's legendary and pioneering queer writers appear together in English translation. This far-reaching, bilingual assortment of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and photography--erotic and personal, revolutionary, hopeful, joyous, and bitter--continues the legacy of defiant queer expression in Brazil and demands its prolific, unapologetic future. In fresh and poetic prose, Raimundo Neto brings us lesser-known narratives of queer life in rural Brazil, including the story of a boy determined to become the "harvest bride" at a the local annual harvest dance. Poet Angélica Freitas details a disturbingly familiar world in which women are divided into rigid binaries--clean or dirty, good or bad--with stark language that builds into utter absurdity. And Caio Fernando Abreu sits in a hospital dying of AIDS, meeting with angels and writing letters in which he repeats "all I can do is write" like a mantra. Spanning four decades, and featuring a total of thirteen writers,Cuíer reminds us again, as Natalia Affonso says in her translation of Tatiana Nascimento's poem: ...what we make lying down is also revolution.

Cuíer (Calico, 4)

Bensimon, Carol

Abreu, Caio Fernando

Freitas, Angélica

BUENO, WILSON

CEsar, Ana Cristina

da Silva, Cidinha

Diacov, Carla

Domeneck, Ricardo

Judar, Cristina

Neto, Raimundo

Nascimento, Tatiana

Junqueira, Marcio

United States

About the Author\nJoão Gilberto Noll (1946–2017) is the author of nearly twenty books. His work appeared in Brazil’s leading periodicals, and he was a guest of the Rockefeller Foundation, King’s College London, and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as a Guggenheim Fellow. A five-time recipient of the Prêmio Jabuti, and the recipient of more than ten awards in all, he died in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the age of seventy.\nEdgar Garbelotto is a writer and translator born in Brazil and based in the U.S. for the past 20 years. He is the translator of João Gilberto Noll’s Lord ((2019) and Harmada (2020), both published by Two Lines Press. His work has appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Asymptote, Ninth Letter, Little Patuxent Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois. Terra Incognita, written in both Portuguese and English, is his debut novel.\nAfter abandoning his traditional life in a deteriorating Porto Alegre, the narrator of Hugs and Cuddles zealously recommits himself to a man he calls “the engineer”, a childhood friend with whom he shared a pivotal sexual encounter. Many years have passed since their prepubescent wrestling; everywhere around them is a nation in decline. Representatives of the Brazilian state—everyone from government officials to the impoverished—endlessly harass passers-by for donations to “the cause,” even as a mysterious plague rages. Never mind that. Our insatiable narrator, driven to discover his true self through increasingly transgressive sexual urges, is on an epic journey through the shadows of this dysfunctional yet polite society.\nThe resulting novel is the late João Gilberto Noll’s most radical statement: A Book of Revelations-grade voyage to the end of gender and the outermost reaches of sexual and artistic expression. Nimbly translated from Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto, Hugs and Cuddles is an unapologetically explicit fable of fluidity that takes readers from decaying city centers to the dark corridors of a mysterious submarine to a miserable hovel in the rainforest, where, at long last, our narrator finds peace.

Hugs and Cuddles

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