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.

The Love of Singular Men

Fiction by Victor Heringer

With a contribution by James Young

Cover design by Pablo Delcan

In a Rio de Janeiro suburb in the 1970s, a family—the parents, their daughter, and crippled teenage son Camilo—take in an orphan named Cosme. The teen boys unexpectedly fall in love, but their intimate world is shattered when Cosme is killed by a neighbor in a brutal hate crime. Decades later, Camilo returns to his hometown, still haunted by this violence and the long shadow of Brazil’s military dictatorship. A fluid, queer coming-of-age story as well as an incisive and unforgiving exploration of Brazilian society and politics, Victor Heringer’s 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
< Zoë Perry Tom Mitchell >