The sweet and the bitter

Winner of the 2019 Sesc Literature Award in the Short Story category.

In the short stories of The Sweet and the Bitter , taboo subjects are treated delicately. Literary quality is evident in every sentence, constructed naturally yet creating powerful effects. The dialogue is agile and precise. Constant reflections run through the text, drawing us deeper into the narrative and the characters, maintaining a tone that is simultaneously violent and gentle. For João Gabriel Paulsen—a young debut author with unquestionable literary talent—a good short story is one that confronts the reader with the unusual, the unexpected, and the astonishing.

In this work, the themes are universal: death and its correlates, contrasted with a tenuous love. Hate, passion, pleasure, pain. It's all there. There are excellent metaphors, and the text bravely avoids any clichés. The connections create an unbroken narrative thread. The contrast between sweet and bitter characterizes the almost kaleidoscopic confusion of opposites that weaves the "narrative fabric" of each of the stories and the book as a whole. The inner coherence is such that it transforms this work into an indissoluble plot, even if traversed by extremes: the heavy and the light, the dreamlike and the real, The sweet and the bitter .