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
Victor Heringer

Victor Heringer

Victor Heringer (1988–2018) was born in Rio de Janeiro. He was a writer and multimedia artist, and his first poetry collection, automatógrafo, was published in 2011, followed by his debut novel Glória, which 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. Heringer was included by Forbes Brazil in their “Under 30 in Literature’” list in 2017. After his death, Companhia das Letras reissued all of his works and a complete anthology of his poems.

cover image of the book The Love of Singular Men

The Love of Singular Men

by Victor Heringer

Translated by James Young

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.

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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

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

— O Globo

There is, in Heringer’s work, a delight in feats of compression and preservation—an encyclopedic effort to stuff as much information as possible into smaller and smaller spaces, to snatch something back from the oblivion of abundance.

— Charlie Lee, The New York Review of Books
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