Hugs and Cuddles

João Gilberto Noll

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Finalist:Lambda Literary Award -Gay Fiction (2023)

After 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.

The 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.

Book Details

Publisher: Two Lines Press
Publish Date: Oct 18th, 2022
Pages: 240
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 6.80in - 4.30in - 0.90in - 0.55lb
EAN: 9781949641387
Categories: • LGBTQ+ - Gay• Literary• World Literature - Brazil

About the Author

Noll, João Gilberto: - João 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.

Garbelotto, Edgar: - Edgar 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.

Praise for this book

"Completely consuming...Hugs and Cuddles laughs at gender, but takes sex seriously. It is both prurient and philosophical, gleefully dirty and wrenchingly serious." --Lily Meyer, NPR

"So far from anything else I've read that is looking at bodies in transformation...I'm in awe." --Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

"Wild, singular, and unapologetically original, this is a perfect read for anyone who wants to step off the beaten path into something unfamiliar and unforgettable." --BuzzFeed (Best New Books of October)

"Noll's novel proposes a new model of sociality, one in which sexual reciprocity is the basis of social exchange. Here, erotic encounters become testing grounds for new political systems and kinship configurations. In this fictional world, where values such as fluidity, collectivity, and jouissance prevail, where bodies are constituted by desire and condemned to be free, self-renunciation may be the key to communion." --Jenny Wu, Astra Mag

"Both immensely entertaining and utterly mystifying...Amid all the erratic and unpredictable hurly-burly lurks an important question: how to 'be a man at peace with his own story'? Noll's genius is to let this existential question we all wrestle with resonate in delicious irresolution....The narrator's willingness to accept surprises and go along with the unpredictability of life...is Noll's invitation to his readers to consider the possibilities of an unbridled, radical openness." --The Gay & Lesbian Review

"Hugs and Cuddles is a relentless sex-saturated fantasia that refuses the boundaries between experience and imagination--always morphing, always shifting, breaking open desire to feel more desire." --Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door

"Shades of [Jean] Genet, but hold the rosewater. All praise to Garbelotto's translation for bringing Noll's unrelenting, bucking tone through." --The Anarchist Review of Books

"Imagine a gay porn collaboration by Dali and David Lynch...it's like the transcription of a dream, surging from one scenario to the next, graphic sex scenes melting into cerebral ponderings which flow into further erotica. As with the work of William S. Burroughs, engaging with Hugs and Cuddles feels like taking a drug as much as reading a book." --Passport Magazine

"Hugs and Cuddles might be the most João Gilberto Noll title to be translated yet. Plenty of novels open with a narrator looking back on a seismic incident from their youth, but very few of them take things to the place where Noll ends this particular book--a dizzying study in transformation and intimacy." --Words Without Borders

"Late Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll offers a breathless exploration of a Porto Alegre man's sexuality and desire....[Hugs and Cuddles] transcends erotica for a memorable story of an attempt at liberation."--Publishers Weekly

"Childhood friends reunite, setting off an exploration into the depths of personhood in João Gilberto Noll's explicit novel Hugs and Cuddles....The seamless, lyrical translation from Portuguese does not leave room to misunderstand the narrator's wants or needs....Erotic and emotional, it does not fan the flames of prurient desire, but makes visceral the knowing of one's own body and the feeling of learning another body, however briefly, in relation....Hugs and Cuddles is a taut fever dream of a novel wherein the body and the sensations it experiences are all that's real."--Foreword Reviews

"A provocative novel about a Brazilian man's urgent desire for queer connection throughout his life."--The Bay Area Reporter

"In this posthumous genre- and gender-bending novel, Noll writes about a man embarking on a transgressive journey of self-discovery while his nation is ravaged around him." --The Millions (Most Anticipated Books of 2022)

"João Gilberto Noll's unique writing explores the mental whirlwind caused by the mystery of desire. In Hugs and Cuddles, our deepest, most intimate erotic transformations are elaborated and played like free jazz by a virtuoso. This is what great literature tastes like, in another brilliant translation by Edgar Garbelotto." --Juan Cárdenas, author of Ornamental

Praise for Joao Gilberto Noll

"Harmada made me laugh out loud as much as it perplexed me, its boisterous absurdity and dreamlike logic making for a delightful way to spend an afternoon." --Rhian ..., The Paris Review

"Reads like a surreal reenactment of Les Misérables set in an imagined city....Noll's novel explores the powerlessness of feeling both disoriented and aroused. The narrator's ambition--which propels the plot--is nearly always based in desire, though the form and object of this desire exists in a state of constant transfiguration." --Asymptote

"The provocative and outlandish story of a washed-up actor drifting through the fantastical city of Harmada.... The book flows with the logic of dreams, the scenes altering as suddenly and inscrutably as the narrator's explosive urges." --Publishers Weekly

"Noll is a hero of Brazilian literature who deserves to be widely known in the English-speaking world." --Jenny Offill, author of Weather

"Noll is a master of prose, one of Brazil's true literary icons." --Literary Hub

"João Gilberto Noll could make any life into a compelling novel." --Music & Literature

"Noll's book are wild, violent, and fast-moving." --Los Angeles Review of Books