Book, Complete Stories by Lima Barreto[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. The importance of Lima Barreto (1881-1922) in Brazilian literature has been the subject of successive reassessments. The stripped-down orality of his texts and the memoirist and journalistic chronicle tone were harshly criticized by contemporaries such as José Verissimo and, at the same time, served as an attraction for the modernist avant-garde. Although he died early, at the age of 41, Lima Barreto left behind an important production of novels, chronicles and short stories. With organization, introduction and notes by Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, this edition brings together the author's 149 short stories, recovered through research into manuscripts, original editions, newspapers and magazines of the time. Both the lesser-known short stories and some more famous ones, such as “A Nova California” and “The man who knew Javanese”, highlight the autobiographical aspect that, according to the organizer, permeates Lima Barreto's entire career. An eyewitness to the political and social upheavals of the Old Republic, Lima Barreto was one of the first writers to embrace his blackness in Brazil. An activist sympathetic to anarchism, descendant of slaves and protégé of the Viscount of Ouro Preto, he entered the intellectual world but was considered a second-rate writer. Later analyses, such as that of Professor Antonio Candido, would say that Lima Barreto is a “lively and penetrating” author. And his late inclusion in the canon of great fiction writers in the Portuguese language would be just one of the many contradictions that characterized his life and work. When reviewing his literary production one hundred years after the publication of Recordações do escrivão Isaías Caminha, his first novel, what we see is the rebellious genius immortalized by the quixotic fury of Policarpo Quaresma and in the freest and most revealing manifestations of his short stories.