if you want to journey to ithaca / call ahead

my children look to me / and grasp after / absolute truths.

Behind the bigotry and hyperbole lurk the fear of the unknown, the threat to the status quo.

At home, no one suspects I do this. Imagine. It’d destroy my marriage.

The compassionate understand pain, but pain cannot be understood; those who suffer understand nothing.

How to explain / the heat a language exhales

His pains originate in another continent. They are graver, and more ancient.

The fishing boat could hold thirty passengers out on the deck.

How should a writer respond to a country as full of variety and stories as Brazil?

Employ hackers to adulterate the online versions of Hamlet.

For a diver, fear brings trouble.

I part the sea in two.

The mermaid treads on knives when she uses her feet.

I’ll either leave here dead—or something worse.

I saw the Paraguayan go astray in the night

Did you forget you’re supposed to slow down going downhill?

Loyal tattoo, immune to the time of origin.

I thought how I could spend a week just looking at her behind

Immobile Bird.

But only one chair was Father's chair, the heir's chair.

I don’t enjoy popping anybody, but it's my job.

A hunchback either becomes impotent or burns in a fire of lasciviousness that never cools for a single instant, like the heat of hell.

Curiously, in recent years God became the most outspoken critic of his own work

The plan involved gradually rewriting Don Quixote over the years, so that no one would notice and collective memories would forget the details. Implausible?

And you need to promise me one thing: don’t let them give me any injections.

The men stirred, restless. Romans, they wanted blood. The whip, the boot, the snap.

The classic “Mastroianni Day” requires a three-piece suit, dark sunglasses, and, preferably, a hat.

It is like knowing you are dead every minute of your life.

I can’t, nor do I want to, unmask her, because in doing so I would destroy myself.

For five years, Berenice waited for a chance to dematerialize her cousin

As day dawned in the small town, old Ruschel was already at work assembling the platform, with the care of someone preparing a gallows.

Your Excellency must excuse the tremulous handwriting and the rambling style, both of which will soon be better understood.

Thus began the most noteworthy period of transformation in Rio de Janeiro.

Eight years later, he returned to Beirut with pictures and stories about the Amazon region, which he passed along to his children and relatives.

Such were my scruples that I voted to acquit all but two of the defendants.

The most brutal morning of his life started with interrupted sleep.

When Elisângela threw the box out, with all the authority of a woman who wears the pants, he didn't really care.

My father abandoned my mother a few months after I was born.

First things first: I didn't write the book everyone thinks I wrote, the one that has been showering me with fame and riches since its publication, just over one year go.

The day, along with Ismael, was dying.

The couple stopped in the middle of the way to rest.

José Eduardo Agualusa, 46, is a growing name in world literature. Born in Huambo, Angola, Agualusa has already been embraced across the Portuguese-speaking literary world—especially in Brazil and Portugal,…

I do not like parties. The idle chat, the smoke, the fatuous talk of drunks, I find them all tiresome.

Alexander Cuadros reports from Brazil's Festa Literária Internacional de Parati (FLIP).

Having lived many years in the scrub grass in the way of birds

There was a high wall between our houses.

Every day the interdental brush probed into hard corners.

I was White and had fianchettoed my bishop. Berta was mounting a strong center pawn position.

I wanted to get out of there.

I am a reader and I came to settle accounts with you.

Fever in the knees / gold in the belly

I’m from where I was born. I’m from elsewhere. –João Guimarães RosaI read Mundo’s letter in a bar in the Beco das Cancelas, an alley-way where I found refuge from the hubbub of…

I looked at my watch. I felt distressed. It's five o'clock.

We ate worms, the most expensive dish at the restaurant.