TOBI'S DESK

Author photo of Daniel Galera © Suhrkamp Verlag. Daniel Galera was born in São Paulo, and spent a year and a half in Garopaba, the Brazilian seaside town that became the setting for his tense, violent, and funny 2012 novel Blood-Drenched Beard , which was published in the U.S. by Penguin Press in 2015. His other novels include The Shape of Bones (2017) and Twenty After Midnight (2020). He has translated works by John Cheever, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith into Portuguese, and his latest book, The God of Ferns,  published in the Portuguese by Companhia das Letras, is a collection of three novellas. Earlier this year, we read the title story, translated by Julia Sanches, and were instantly hooked by its almost uncanny state of suspense, so we decided to share an adapted excerpt with you, to get you through these rather strange holidays we’re having. Galera answered some questions about the story and about his writing from his home in Porto Alegre, where he lives with ...

Illustrations by Oliver Munday. An adapted excerpt of the novella by Daniel Galera, translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches. Manuela hates that it’s taking so long. For the past two weeks, she’s hauled her belly up and down the stairs of their building, and along sidewalks where dirty water from the last October rainfall still splashes against her swollen ankles—and she’s sick of it. She wants to sleep belly-down, without pillows to support her. She wants to get up from the toilet without needing to hold on to the sink, to stop being kicked on the inside of her ribs, to have normal sex again. And Lucas, who’s always thought of himself as the kind of guy who can fight off exhaustion, confident in the perpetuum mobile of stamina that’s stored in his guts and keeps him in action no matter how badly he’s being pounded—lately, Lucas has been feeling paralyzed by a fear that he can’t fully understand. He’s scared he won’t make enough money to cover the basics, that Manuela will g...

Every week, the editors of  The Paris Review  lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by  signing up for the Redux newsletter . When we at the Review first read Sterling HolyWhiteMountain’s story “ This Then Is a Song, We Are Singing ,” which is published in our new Winter issue, we found ourselves in thrall to the story’s narrator—who, for all of his rage and confusion, self-justification and delusion, is undeniably charismatic. Inspired by the pleasure we took in spending time in his company (at least on the page), we hunted through the archives for some of the most memorable—which is to say, memorably off-kilter—voices the Review has published over the years. Inevitably, this led us to our Art of Fiction interview with Marguerite Young, whose hallucinatory novel  Miss Macintosh, My Darling is, in her wor...

An illustration by the painter Natalie Frank for The Island of Happiness. One of Frank’s favorite tales is ‘The Green Serpent,” in which the prince is a snake, though only literally. “I love the image where you have to get into bed with this creature but you can’t look at him, and of course you look at him.” Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville was born into a rich family in the fall of 1652. At thirteen, she was wed by her mother to the middle-aged Baron d’Aulnoy, who had purchased his title. Three months pregnant that same year, in the summer of 1666, she inked a jinx in the margins of a fifteenth-century religious play from their library: It has been almost 200 years since this book was made, and whoever will have this Book should know that it was mine and that it belongs to our house. Written in Normandie near Honfleur. Adieu, Reader, if you have my book and I don’t know you and you don’t appreciate what’s inside, I wish you ringworm, scabies, fever, the plague, measles, a...

In which we tell you some of the things we most enjoyed reading this year.  Rhian Sasseen’s reading log. Maybe this is unsurprising for an audio producer, but I like listening to people talk: about their job, their bad childhood, their love life, the bigots living next door. People are funny, especially when discussing things that aren’t. Here are some of the books I read this year that felt like listening. In Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets , Belarusian oral historian Svetlana Alexievich sits at kitchen tables across the former USSR and records people’s stories. Not for the faint of heart. Or if you are, I recommend taking frequent breaks to watch dogs at the dog park.  In the seventies, right before computers would change almost everything, Chicago radio interviewer Studs Terkel walked the streets and asked people “what they do all day and how they feel about what they do.” Every single one-and-a-half-page testimony in Working feels like a novel. For T...