The Love of Singular Men

Victor Heringer

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Finalist:National Book Critics Circle Award -John Leonard Prize (2023)

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 ALTA FIRST TRANSLATION PRIZE

In the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, one summer in the 1970s, a family--a husband and wife, their daughter, and their crippled teenage son Camilo--take in an orphan named Cosme. The boys unexpectedly fall in love, but an act of violence shatters their intimate world and changes their lives forever. Decades later, when Camilo returns to his hometown, he is haunted by his first love and the long shadow of Brazil's military dictatorship. At once an incisive and unforgiving study of Brazilian society and a fluid, queer coming-of-age story, Victor Heringer's exhilarating and moving novel is worthy of Machado de Assis.

Book Details

Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date: Sep 5th, 2023
Pages: 144
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.30in - 5.40in - 0.50in - 0.40lb
EAN: 9780811237475
Categories: • World Literature - Denmark• Women• Family Life - General

About the Author

Young, James: - James Young is a writer, translator, and editor from Belfast, Ireland.

Heringer, Victor: - The writer and multimedia artist Victor Heringer was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1988. His debut novel Glória was awarded the 2013 Prêmio Jabuti. The Love of Singular Men was published by Companhia das Letras in 2016, and was shortlisted for the São Paulo Prize for Literature, the Rio Prize for Literature, and the Oceanos Prize. Tragically, Heringer took his own life in 2018.

Praise for this book

One of the best novels in recent years.-- "Asymptote"

Heringer had little time to live, but he marked an entire generation of writers and readers.-- "O Globo"

When you read something genuinely new it's hard to describe it - you end up settling for comparisons - and The Love of Singular Men is truly a singular novel. It's ingenious like Cortazar or Nabokov, elliptical like Grace Paley, funny like Donald Barthelme. Upon finishing it you want to immediately meet the young man who wrote it, shake him vigorously by the hand and congratulate him on the beginning of a brilliant career. But Victor Heringer is gone. He left this beautiful book behind.
--Zadie Smith

The brief, precise scenes - incorporating photos, lists and handwritten passages - enable Heringer to cover a great deal in a short space and make a potentially gloomy story into a multilayered celebration of life. That the author died in 2018, aged 29, is a loss to international literature.--John Self "The Guardian"

Heringer once said that he loved the serendipity of creation, like exploring a mountain and discovering new places to twist your ankle. His commitment to heterodoxy, singularity and incongruity made him an artist of the loose end. He killed himself aged twenty nine, when he was beginning to make his name. Perhaps the 'who knows why' that whispers through all his work applies also to this.--Lorna Scott Fox "New Left Review"

The novel's genius emerges from this condition of abject solitude: attempting to write his way out of a world in "perpetual moral hangover," Heringer finds beauty and humor even in tragedy.--Adam Morris "The Baffler"

Grand and strangely devastating.--Charlie Lee "The New York Review of Books" (10/19/2023 12:00:00 AM)

It's the first book in a long time I've wanted to read again the moment I finished it. ... The book's texture is marvelously diffuse and porous, allowing wild movements through (and juxtapositions of) time...I can't think of many pages in books I've read in recent years that are such pure demonstrations of virtuosity.--Garth Greenwell

Heringer's writing is a braid of the tirelessly hilarious and the deadly serious.--Tim Pfaff "The Bay Area Reporter"