Select: A world of brevities

This selection brings together short stories and fragments of novels by the award-winning writer João Anzanello Carrascoza.

A small sample of the vast literary output of this author, who chose short stories as his preferred form of expression—even when we're talking about his novels. Each excerpt here is a fleeting episode of his own soul, a slice of life.

Carrascoza is a writer of everyday details, of the small tendernesses and anxieties that, at the end of the day, are the great shapers of subjectivity. This insightful gaze allows him to dissect intimacy with lyrical yet precise prose. The simple moments of childhood memories, family bonds, sweet silences, or bitter absences are the source for narratives that culminate in epiphanies and transfigurations.

This selection brings together short stories from award-winning books such as The Blue Vase , All That Water , Just Time , and Catalog of Losses , as well as excerpts from novels such as The Absent One's Notebook , Girl Writing with Her Father , and The Skin of the Earth , from the recent and acclaimed Farewell Trilogy . The selection was made by the author himself, at the publisher's request. What for Carrascoza was a meticulous exercise in exploration, for the reader is a concise way of accessing great stories by one of our greatest prose writers.

“Because of the subtlety with which they capture glimpses of the human condition, the best stories in The Blue Vase deserve to be called epiphanic, if only because the 'sudden spiritual manifestation' to which they give tacit voice always occurs in the 'vulgarity' of everyday life.” - José Paulo Paes, Jornal de Resenhas/Folha de S.Paulo

“With what subtle and compassionate art the narrator knows how to speak the silences that unite parents and children.” - Alfredo Bosi, in a presentation of The Volume of Silence

“In their restraint, some stories approach poems, without shying away from constructions that smooth over the beauty of words, sounds, and images.” - Beatriz Resende, literary critic and university professor, for O Estado de S. Paulo.

“Carrascoza writes, among other things, about the anguish of the small, of desiring little and of being tortured by routine, even though in every subtle movement there is a transformed destiny.” - Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Folha de S.Paulo

“This is what Carrascoza’s writing is made of, poetry that wants to be silent, details that build everyday life, melancholy, lyricism.” - Luiz Ruffato, writer.

"Carrascoza is a polisher of sentences, a filigree artist. It is in the stories of this São Paulo native from Cravinhos that the word 'lyricism' acquires maximum value. His prose is intimate, with soft and tender tones." - Nelson de Oliveira, Nossa América

"The characters hardly speak, but the silence serves as a counterpoint to a whole body language, and what is not said in words is expressed through gestures, looks, small touches. The result is a sophisticated game between 'readers,' in the everyday encounter, or confrontation." - Flávio Carneiro, Jornal de Resenhas/Folha de S.Paulo

“The result of this slow-motion prose is an unusual tenderness, almost naive, but genuine. (…) Carrascoza’s literature contributes to the critique of destructive massification as much as those writers who attack it directly.” - Haroldo Ceravolo Sereza, O Estado de S. Paulo