The Appointment (Special Edition)

In celebration of Fernando Sabino's centenary, this hardcover edition with a new graphic design of O encontro marcado includes previously unpublished texts by Michel Laub and Adauto Leva, as well as a letter from Clarice Lispector to the author.

Originally published in 1956, O encontro marcado , one of the most important works in the career of Fernando Sabino, winner of the Jabuti and the Machado de Assis Prize, has been given a new deluxe edition to commemorate the centenary of his birth, with previously unpublished texts: an introduction by award-winning writer Michael Laub; a history of the book's reception by Adauto Leva, a scholar of Sabino's work; and the full reproduction of a letter from Clarice Lispector about O encontro marcado , written to the author months after the book's release.

The novel, with autobiographical overtones, traces the desperate search for the “self” and the true meaning of life through the eyes of the young writer Eduardo Marciano, who matures in a disoriented world, experiencing inner dramas and exposing the fundamental mistakes that have been frustrating his existence and suffocating his vocation.

The "four miners of the Apocalypse"—writers Hélio Pellegrino, Paulo Mendes Campos, Otto Lara Resende, and Fernando Sabino—whose friendship marked Brazilian literature and the generation portrayed in The Encounter Marked , inspired some of the book's characters and episodes. It is, therefore, a portrait of the experience of an entire generation, charged with drama and existential questions.

"Personally, returning to The Appointment as a 50-year-old writer is to deepen this dialogue that exists in the book and within me. I may feel some tenderness for Eduardo's youthful naiveté—which would support the hypothesis of taste shaped by personal reminiscences—but this only occurs because the book's outcome is never naive. In the worldview that prose emulates at various points, literature transcends time and gives meaning to the existence of its creator. But the protagonist's fate belies this, and the book we hold in our hands belies the denial." - Michel Laub

"It seems like an old-fashioned quality, that of a book 'captivating.' I think it's an essential, enviable quality. A truly accomplished book is one you don't want to put down. My visual impression of it is of straight, thin lines crisscrossing and cutting each other. The first pause, the very first, comes precisely and only at the end. And it was so beautiful—finally, finally, the great pause. And my visual impression—I know it will seem banal to you—was of light. Amen, Fernando, amen. For all of us. I've never felt so much like I belonged to a 'generation.' For the first time, perhaps, I felt the word generation in another sense. And you see, Fernando, this came from something more, in your book, than from facts and environments, because my life didn't have those facts or those environments. It comes from something more, from something essential that you grasped, and that gave me this impression of 'we're all in the same boat.' And that gave me the certainty of a set meeting, and hope." - Clarice Lispector on The Set Meeting