Overview

In Letters from a Seducer, Hilst describes the everyday life of Karl, a wealthy, erudite, and amoral man who seeks an answer to his incomprehension of life through sex. Karl writes and sends twenty provocative letters to Cordelia, his chaste sister. The letters' text becomes intertwined with the life of the poet Stamatius, who finds Karl's letters in the trash, as Hilst constructs an ingenious mirror play between the two that casts strange light on questions of amorality, sexuality and the spirit. Linguistically rich and endlessly playful, Letters from a Seducer is a work of perverse genius by one of Brazil's greatest modern writers.

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9781805331384

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Reviews

'She is a novelist with the fecundity and multivocality of Joyce, with the precision and wit of Sarraute, and yet she is something new under the sun, the poet of ""friezes, strips, joyful bands, columbombastic screams."" Maybe all women wonder what men would be like, without their posturing and wack, but it seems to me Hilst had more than an inkling' - Dodie Bellamy 'Letters of a Seducer seduces the reader with all the strategies available to a fine writer: wit, wonderfully inventive language lushly captured by the translator, an intriguing story-and did I say sexuality that broils and bubbles along at a mad and marvelous intensity? This is a brilliant performance!' - Samuel R. Delany 'Consider this your personal message of recommendation from me to you to read Hilda Hilst, as much as you can... Letters From a Seducer will make you blush, gasp, become aroused then feel weird about it, laugh a lot. After reading any Hilst your body and mind will make more and less sense to each other. Your verbal and sensorial understandings will alter, youll slap your thigh and yell at the shock of a line, youll feel drunk, ungodly and fantastically free.' - Holly Pester, author of 'The Lodgers' 'A modern master of disturbance... A joyfully wicked writer' - TLS

Author Information

Hilda Hilst (1930-2004) was born in Jaú, a small town in the state of São Paulo. She studied law at the University of São Paulo before dedicating herself to writing from 1954. She published novels, poetry and plays and won many prestigious literary prizes, gaining recognition as one of the most significant and controversial figures in Brazilian literature. The Obscene Madame D is also forthcoming from Pushkin Press.

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