Amora
Stories
Published on 19. May 2020
Book
Hardback
234 pages
978-1-5420-1977-4 (ISBN)
Description
From an emerging talent comes an exquisite collection of stories exploring the complexity of love between women, each a delicate piece in a mosaic transcending the boundaries of literary romance.
Amora dares explore the way women love each other-the atrophy and healing of the female spirit in response to sexual desire and identity. These thirty-three short stories and poems, crafted with a deliberate delicacy, each capture the candid, private moments of women in love.
Together, these stories and the women who inhabit them reveal an illuminating portrait of the sacred female romance, with all its nuances, complexities, burdens, and triumphs revealed. Violence, sickness, chaos, tenderness, beauty, and freedom adorn these pages in a mosaic of unforgettable moments, including a lesbian granddaughter discovering unexpected commonalities with her grandmother, a teenager's tryst with her friend after disenchanting sex with a boy, and an old couple's dreamy Sunday-morning ritual.
Sweeping nearly every major Brazilian literary prize in 2016-including the Premio Jabuti and Premio Acorianos de Literatura-Amora has propelled Natalia Borges Polesso to the forefront of the international literary world.
Amora dares explore the way women love each other-the atrophy and healing of the female spirit in response to sexual desire and identity. These thirty-three short stories and poems, crafted with a deliberate delicacy, each capture the candid, private moments of women in love.
Together, these stories and the women who inhabit them reveal an illuminating portrait of the sacred female romance, with all its nuances, complexities, burdens, and triumphs revealed. Violence, sickness, chaos, tenderness, beauty, and freedom adorn these pages in a mosaic of unforgettable moments, including a lesbian granddaughter discovering unexpected commonalities with her grandmother, a teenager's tryst with her friend after disenchanting sex with a boy, and an old couple's dreamy Sunday-morning ritual.
Sweeping nearly every major Brazilian literary prize in 2016-including the Premio Jabuti and Premio Acorianos de Literatura-Amora has propelled Natalia Borges Polesso to the forefront of the international literary world.
Reviews / Votes
"With brevity, abstraction, and narrative tension, Polesso offers a poignant look at women alternately broken down and resilient. Fans of Lucia Berlin will love these tense and twisty tales." -Publishers Weekly"Borges Polesso explores the depths of amorous relationships between women young and old, married and single, out and closeted, independent and cripplingly co-dependent-but first and foremost, in love...A romp through 33 stories of lesbian love." -Kirkus Reviews
"[A] thrillingly idiosyncratic collection." -OprahMag.com
"Offers nuanced snapshots of heartbreak and desire...a springy translation...There's a lot to love in these 33 stories of love between women...Polesso's writing is brisk and fresh, and she captures the bleak human comedy of the myriad ways we mess up when it comes to matters of the heart. Her women often have a hefty sense of self-loathing, and a drily pained view of the world. But Polesso can be sweet too. She offers windows into the private worlds created by long-term lovers...an enjoyable collection...many stories ripple with the ingrained fear and shame that comes from feeling you have to keep your sexuality hidden." -The Guardian (UK)
"Natalia Borges Polesso's brilliant short story collection follows a circle of lesbians living in Brazil, some of whom know one another and some of whom don't. Love is what threads these 33 stories together-self-love, love for other women, and a love for a freedom that only truth can bring...real, vulnerable, and full of twists you'll never see coming." -Bitch Media (UK)
"Moving beyond romantic and sexual love in its exploration of women's relationships, Amora is, at turns, tender and raw." -Bustle
"Less a collection of stories than a collage of vibrant snapshots, Polesso's entrancing compilation-awarded Brazil's most prestigious literary prizes-offers pithy-poetic glimpses into the lives of women of various ages who love and desire other women." -O, the Oprah Magazine
"Amora elevates the stories of women loving women...Each story is a new shape. In each of the thirty-three stories (Yes truly. Every single one of them!) a woman confronts her feelings for another woman. Sometimes, like in 'Dreaming,' the Sapphic desire is the crux on which everything is built. Other times, like in 'Bite Your Tongue,' it's just a fact vaguely audible to the larger plot. But it's always there. Even if it's lurking in the background. And sometimes that's what feels the most groundbreaking. A story can be queer, even if the point of it isn't queerness...the stories feel very much alive." -Lambda Literary
"Amora captures the realness of what relationships are like in a real way." -OprahMag.com
"Natalia Borges Polesso is a rising Brazilian writer who deserves to be on all your lists...I was enchanted with these tales at every turn." -Book Riot
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Seattle
United States
Publishing group
Amazon Publishing
ISBN-13
978-1-5420-1977-4 (9781542019774)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Natalia Borges Polesso is from Bento Goncalves in Brazil. She is a writer and a translator with a PhD in literary theory. She is the author of Cutouts for Photo Album without People (2013), Amora (2015)-which in 2016 won the Premio Jabuti, the Jabuti Amazon Reader's Choice Award, the Book of the Year AGES Award, and the Premio Acorianos de Literatura-and Control (2019), among other titles. In 2017, she was one of only two Brazilian authors on the Bogota39 list, which selects the most promising Latin American authors under thirty-nine.