Praise
Abreu’s prose shimmers and always surprises—each story is a small, bright gem. The fearless writing in this beautiful collection deserves a vast English-language readership.
— Publishers Weekly, starred review
Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries introduces one of Brazil’s most important and original prose writers to English language readers. Translated with expert nuance and brio by Bruna Dantas Lobato, Abreu’s collection depicts the almost forgotten world of 1980s Brazil, a world shaped by military dictatorship, AIDS, and economic crisis, filtered through a rich and multilayered queer sensibility. You will want to add this startling collection to your bookshelf.
— John Keene
Lending an almost painfully humane eye and ear to his characters, Caio Fernando Abreu constructs scenarios of staggering psychological depth from everyday gestures and occasions. Inevitably, devastatingly, readers are destined to meet themselves in his prismatic prose.
— Lucy Ives, author of Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World
Moldy Strawberries gives us an unforgettable portrait of politics and desire as these are written incrementally and achingly in the hearts of Brazilians. Bruna Dantas Lobato’s graceful and rhythmically acute translation brings close the loss and longing in Caio Fernando Abreu’s profound story sequence.
— Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm
Sweaty and beautiful, profound and masterfully translated, this marvelous collection of stunning fictions could not be more irresistible.
— Rikki Ducornet
Abreu's writing teems with the desperate and dispirited, beatific loners who are propelled by a gravitational hunger for some shred of authenticity or understanding, for intimate correspondence with another. There are monumental truths to be found in each of these stories, drifting amid the queasy weightlessness of oblivion and craving acknowledgement. Moldy Strawberries is an act of unshakeable compassion.
— Justin Walls
Caio Fernando's work is made of gulps of feelings . . . The book maintains a strong unity when speaking of the courage it takes to undress the loyalty of our most intimate and most terrible feelings, and the difficulty of being.
— José Castello
Caio is like this: a writer who writes all that he feels and always seeks—and finds—the truth.
— Hilda Hilst
For Abreu, writing is a form of salvation: from madness, from death, from invisibility, and, especially, from the self.
— Bruna Dantas Lobato
Books like Moldy Strawberries fulfill what Caio said was a writer's purpose: to create a sort of "biography of emotions" of their time.
— Michel Laub, Valor
Reading or rereading Moldy Strawberries is an experience that cannot be merely beautiful. You must also feel its historical complicity.
— Schneider Carpeggiani, Suplemento Pernambuco
Caio was a man of immediacy, he never searched for eternity. With writing that was based on his own experiences, he wound up offering a timeless testimonial of what happens to people during times of oppression.
— Alexandre Vidal Porto, Suplemento Pernambuco
Caio is very visceral. He writes about anguish, fear, and despair.
— Alice Sant'Anna
Caio is one of those authors who is picked up by every generation.
— Ítalo Moriconi
A stark collection of short stories from a Brazilian writer who creates specks of beauty with every stroke of the pen . . . Abreu remarkably captures a feeling that escapes definition, a proximity to death so palpable that the words scream its song. Abreu’s prose is still, rich, and full of time lost and time future. A profoundly moving collection on surviving stillness.
— Kirkus Reviews
[Abreu’s] writing is at times delirious, arresting and revolutionary, often using fragmentation and the language of dreams to describe the world around him . . . This luminous collection of stories shows him to be one of the most compelling writers of the continent.
— Morning Star
[Moldy Strawberries,] is as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, vaulting existential questions across the page while poking fun at the urge to ask them in the first place, both yearning for and laughing at utopian visions of the past. The strawberry fields of the 1960s and ’70s have grown moldy, but, in Abreu’s writing, within the mulch lies the promise of the new, a chance to start again.
— Rosa Boshier, Hyperallergic
[Moldy Strawberries] amplifies the lives of people who were often disregarded or dismissed by a Brazilian society in flux. Its stories vibrate with emotion and honesty, conveyed through distinct voices and strong imagery by a confident and deft writer.
— Monica Carter, Foreword Reviews
As a gay man who was placed on a wanted list by the military dictatorship, went into self-imposed exile, and died of AIDS at 47, Abreu himself was acutely aware of what happens when you no longer have cause to believe in the future’s inevitability. His writing has a unique set of concerns: how to exist in a perpetual, unstable present; how to make sense of the confusion produced when a mind cannot look forward, only backward — or perhaps worse, inward . . . But as the collection’s title might suggest, where there is rot — despair, danger, illness, heartbreak, loneliness — there is also fruit . . . There is at the very least – for Abreu, and for the characters in Moldy Strawberries – some dignity in existing as you are, even if it will kill you.
— Jane Pritchard, Los Angeles Review of Books
Moldy Strawberries is a portrait of queer life in which it's impossible to divorce pleasure from politics . . . Dantas Lobato’s translation moves with lightning speed as Abreu’s characters go out in the rain, drink with abandon, reach across the dance floor, and gaze at the planets and at one another. Abreu hammers away at the core of life until it’s chiseled and brilliant, until it splinters, suddenly, into language.
— Oriana Ullman, The Paris Review
Reading Moldy Strawberries feels like immersing yourself underwater, in a beautiful world full of vivid colors and unfamiliar textures. While the current could drag you under–for danger and sadness are ever-present, the foil to vibrant love and desire–you surface feeling profoundly changed by your experiences.
— Georgina Fooks, Asymptote
That Moldy Strawberries can embody the ambivalence of pleasant despair is a testament to its characters’ complexity, their ability to simultaneously navigate multiple lines of thought—some trivial, others profound—and multiple versions of the self—some public and performative, others private or reserved for a kindred spirit. To witness their distracted impulses, their tendencies to veer from one thought or self to another, is to witness these characters’ humanity.
— Jenny Hu, Ploughshares
These 18 stories . . . distill flashes of joy, despair, and lust into crystalline moments of flickering emotion . . . [Moldy Strawberries] vibrates with emotion and honesty, conveyed through distinct voices and strong imagery by a confident and deft writer.
— Monica Carter, Forward Reviews
The author bestows extreme depth, tenderness, and range upon his characters, as we witness them slip between lucidity and confusion, hope and despair, companionship and solitude . . . Lush, intimate, visceral, and unflinching . . . unrestrained by clinical distance or moral panic . . . Moldy Strawberries is a heart-wrenching translation and a moving tribute to Abreu.
— Emily Hunsberger, Latin American Literature Today
[Abreu] became, and remains, the kind of cult figure who stirs the passions of aspiring young writers.
— Adam Morris, The Baffler
Like any true artist, Caio Fernando Abreu turns form into substance, searches for meaning in the textures that come with a tactile awareness of one’s own graceless, limbed existence. Repeatedly, without ever tempering his thoughts, Abreu wonders if we’re simply the sum of our longings, reflections, and movements.
— Neil Czeszejko, Delphic Review
Abreu is blatant in the best way. I was often reminded of his Brazilian compatriot, Clarice Lispector, whose books seemed to wrench you straight into her nerve endings. But if Lispector’s writing draws its power from its claustrophobic transcendence, Abreu’s prose offers a meter to the trembling gravity that pulls us towards one another . . . Moldy Strawberries is a startling, sensuous, and pulpy journal of the meaning we make of each other.
— Carr Harkrader, Necessary Fiction
Abreu’s most inspiring stories feel painfully relevant.
— Helen McColpin, Massachusetts Review
-- Praise for Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga? --
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Abreu’s work [is] at once satirical and tender, silly and serene; it begins in darkness and ends advancing toward light.
— Jane Giles, The New York Times
The late Brazilian author’s feisty prose is reminiscent of both Reinaldo Arenas and Manuel Puig [...]. An insidiously rich and disturbing fiction, the work of a remarkable writer who died much too soon.
— Kirkus Reviews
Extras
Those two in The American Scholar
The Day Uranus Entered Scorpio in BOMB
Pear, Grape, Apple in Bookforum