Penguin's literary rentrée news

Ana Margarida de Carvalho's return to long fiction, Bernardo Carvalho's latest novel, and Daniel Jonas' prose debut are some of Penguin's highlights until November.

The news was presented this Thursday by the Penguin Random House Portugal group, which also returns with new books by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Irene Solà, Jon Fosse, and has as its main focus a major journalistic investigation into the origins of Chega.

This month, Companhia das Letras publishes “Os subiros” (The Substitutes), by Brazilian Bernardo Carvalho, an author practically absent from national publications since the closure of Cotovia (the publisher that published this writer), with the exception of a novel released by Quetzal in 2015.

“The Surrogates” follows a father with inappropriate behavior in a Brazil under military dictatorship and a son who tries to survive his father by taking refuge in reading a science fiction novel, living a kind of parallel life.

The narrative unfolds at the pace of two visions of the same world, reaching the most intimate of their experiences, namely through the son's discovery of his father's deviant sexuality and his own homosexuality, in a novel that is fictional but anchored in some real aspects of the author's life.

Another debut under this label, also arriving in bookstores this month, is by Ana Margarida de Carvalho, who is now publishing “The rain that throws the sand from the Sahara,” the writer’s return to the novel, six years after “The gesture we make to protect our head.”

The story begins with a drunk man being transported in a cart, taken prisoner and unknowingly sentenced to hard labor in a hidden quarry, where he ends up meeting a whole gallery of grotesque characters.

"A justa desproproção" is the debut prose work of poet and translator Daniel Jonas, with a collection of texts that cover everything from the most elevated to the most mundane subjects, from famous people to the most ordinary, in a publication from the same publisher coming out this month.

Another highlight of the imprint is the unprecedented publication, in October, of “The Foreign Legion”, by Clarice Lispector, as the author imagined it, recovering the original edition, from 1964, which was part of the set of texts “Fundo de garra” (Drawer Fund).

In the same month, Companhia das Letras also published a new novel by Ricardo Adolfo, “A chefe dos maus”, the first set in Japan (the country where this writer and publicist lives), and another by João Tordo, “Inventário da solidão”.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez returns to Alfaguara with “The Names of Feliza”, a story inspired by the Colombian sculptor Feliza Bursztyn, who died prematurely at the age of 48, in a Paris restaurant, where she was with her husband and four friends, one of them the writer Gabriel García Márquez, who a few days later published an article in which he stated that his friend had died “of sadness”.

Feliza, born in 1933, followed an unusual path for the time, desiring above all to be her own woman, which led her first to divorce and then to become an artist. Two scandals led to her persecution and exile in Paris.

The writer began with the enigma of her death to investigate the unknown life of this revolutionary artist, creating a novel that interweaves biography, reality, and imagination.

At the same time comes “A malcriada”, the second novel by Italian Beatrice Salvioni, which follows on from “A malnascido”, published by Alfaguara in 2023.

In October, Carmen Maria Machado returns, the first novel in Portugal by the North American writer — whose collection of short stories "Her Body and Other Parts" has already been published by Penguin — which addresses a memory of abuse during her college days, with an unusual style of writing that blends tradition and folklore with modernity.

Also back in the bookstores are the multi-award-winning French writer Marie NDiaye, whose books "A vendetta é minha" and now "Ladivine" have already been published, and the Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince, with "A nuestro hora" (Our Hour), a memoir that tells the tragic story of a trip he took to Ukraine to participate in a book fair in 2023, which ended in the bombing of the restaurant where he was, causing the death of several people, including the guide, who had switched places with him.

Also in October is the release of "What I Don't Know About You," the debut novel by Canadian writer Eric Chacour, which has won several awards. It's about a fully established doctor with a wife and children who falls in love with a poor boy living in a slum where he cares for his mother.

Cavalo de Ferro's 'rentrée' is marked by the publication of titles by already renowned authors, such as “Labirinto à beira-mar”, a book of essays that had yet to be published by the Polish author Zbigniew Herbert, and “Dei-te olhos e viste as trevas”, by the Catalan Irene Solà, a novel deeply rooted in Catalan tradition and folklore, set during the early hours of the morning, in which a bedridden elderly woman is watched over by her dead ancestors.

In October, another of George Simenon's 'romans durs' arrives, "The House of Krull"; the book that brought international acclaim to Hungarian Péter Nádas, "The End of a Family Romance"; and the latest novel by fellow Hungarian Lázló Krasznahorkai — whose "Satan's Tango" had only been published by Antígona — entitled "Herscht 07769", which is a satirical story about modern times, written in a single sentence, from beginning to end, without punctuation.

November brings another novel by Jon Fosse, the first he wrote after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, and which will give rise to a trilogy: "Vain," the story of a man who travels by boat to a town in search of a needle and thread to sew on a button, falls in love, and returns home with this woman, who leaves her husband. After living together, he dies, and the woman returns to the husband she abandoned.

Elsinore will reissue "War Has No Woman's Face" and "The Voices of Chernobyl — The Story of a Nuclear Disaster," by Svetlana Alexievich, and publish "The Collapse," a new book by Édouard Louis, which once again focuses on violence.

The imprint also publishes in October "The Road to Donbas," by Ukrainian writer Serhij Zhadan, which depicts the return to a desolate region with a Soviet industrial landscape and armed gangs, written in a style that critics classify as "bookish jazz."

In non-fiction, the highlight is "Inside Chega. The Hidden Face of the Far Right in Portugal," published by Objetiva, which is the result of journalist Miguel Carvalho's investigation into that party over the past five years.

In the objectively collection, the book of essays "Against Progress" by philosopher Slavoj Zizek, which reflects on the idea of ​​progress, begins with an image from Christopher Nolan's film "The Third Step," in which a magician makes birds disappear and, when asked by a child whether he killed them, replies no, that it's illusionism, only to be seen throwing dead birds away in a bin. The author's analogy with what happens today is this: we don't see dead birds, but they are there.

The other book in the same collection is "Techno-Feudalism or the End of Capitalism," by Yanis Varoufakis, which shows how power gradually began to concentrate in large technology companies, which enrich and feed off Internet and social media users, privatizing this space, enslaving minds, and redrawing the geopolitical map.