Sevastopol

Three subtly connected stories converge in this chimerical debut, showcasing a powerful new Brazilian voice. Sevastopol. contains three distinct narratives, each burrowing into a crucial turning point in a person's life: a young woman gives a melancholy account of her obsession with climbing Mount Everest; a Peruvian-Brazilian vanishes into the forest after staying in a musty, semi-abandoned inn somewhere in the haunted depths of the Brazilian countryside; a young playwright embarks on the production of a play about the city of Sevastopol and a Russian painter portraying Crimean War soldiers. Inspired by Tolstoy's The Sevastopol Sketches. , Emilio Fraia masterfully weaves together these stories of yearning and loss, obsession and madness, failure and the desire to persist, in a restrained manner reminiscent of the prose of Anton Chekhov, Roberto Bolaño, and Rachel Cusk. Praise for. Sevastopol. A truly beautiful book that is hard to describe without using words like precision, subtlety and, mostly, wisdom. - Alejandro Zambra. Like the writers I most admire, Fraia sets for himself the hardest and most respectable task a writer can face: unravelling the mystery without revealing the secret. - Javier Montes. Fraia captures a very specific sense of what it is like to live in São Paulo in the current political climate, but he also captures something much more universal: what it is like to live in a culture from which you feel entirely disconnected and, within that culture, to try to make art of any kind. I think that theme can speak to readers in any country. - Deborah Treisman. Graceful and melancholic, enhanced by Zoë Perry's subtle translation. Impeccably realised, and this is another groundbreaking publication from newish Lolli Editions. - Catherine Taylor,. The Irish Times. Somber, spare stories that let the reader crawl inside, searching for insight, only to be left greedily craving more. -. Kirkus Reviews. If Graciliano Ramos describes the old, romantic Brazil of a century ago, Emilio Fraia describes something much more like the country that exists today-the country and people I know. The translation is excellent, by the way. - Benjamin Moser. Pointillist. The fragmentary character of this allusive, mercurial book is such that, when you finish it, you have an assortment of eye-catching puzzle pieces but no clear sense of how they're meant to go together. - The Wall Street Journal. Beguilingly dreamlike. With remarkable agility, Fraia draws connections between voyeurism, narrative ethics, contemporary art and the no-man's-land of memories that stir within dreams. - Adam Morris,. TLS. EMILIO FRAIA. was born in São Paulo in 1982. Sevastopol. , his third book, was one of the winners of the Biblioteca Nacional Prize and a finalist for the Oceanos Prize and Jabuti Prize. One of Granta's. Best Young Brazilian Writers, Fraia has been awarded a Civitella Ranieri Writing Fellowship and is currently an editor at Companhia das Letras. ZOË PERRY. 's translations of contemporary Portuguese-language writers have appeared in The New Yorker. , Granta. , and Words Without Borders. She is a founding member of the London-based translators' collective the Starling Bureau.