"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.'"

--The New Yorker

"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

"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

"The End, a riotous, sex-stuffed novel by Torres, which takes Technicolor pleasure in detailing the deaths of five incorrigible old beach bums of the Bossa Nova generation.... Her five men, whom she kills off in reverse chronology, are 'united by male allegiance, women, and the beach, in that order'.... With America undergoing a mass reckoning with male sexuality, a novel like this feels both taboo and gleeful, a guilty kind of reprieve."

--Hermione Hoby, The New Yorker