Translator of Portuguese
Zoë Perry’s translations of contemporary Portuguese-language writers have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, and Words Without Borders. Perry has won a PEN/Heim translation grant and a FLIP international literary festival residence, and is a founding member of the London-based translators collective the Starling Bureau.
Translated by Zoë Perry
Three subtly connected stories converge in this chimerical debut, each burrowing into a turning point in a person’s life: a young woman gives a melancholy account of her obsession with climbing Mount Everest; a Peruvian-Brazilian vanishes into the forest after staying in a musty, semi-abandoned inn in the haunted depths of the Brazilian countryside; a young playwright embarks on the production of a play about the city of Sevastopol and a Russian painter portraying Crimean War soldiers.
Inspired by Tolstoy’s The Sevastopol Sketches, Emilio Fraia masterfully weaves together these stories of yearning and loss, obsession and madness, failure and the desire to persist, in a restrained manner reminiscent of Anton Chekhov, Roberto Bolaño, and Rachel Cusk.
