Fario: 74 books

"And over the years, in other loves, more real and longer lasting, he never experienced a feeling like that of that Sunday on Rua da Lapa, when he was fifteen years old." Fifteen-year-old Inácio has been sent to work as a runner for the lawyer Borges. Borges's wife, the full-figured...

"We'll spend five minutes talking with some people, go from one station to the next with others, live two or three years, or even twenty, with others still. At bottom, though, we do nothing but run into each other (how long doesn't matter), run into each other and always by chance. And always part company." Genre: short story

"At forty, he was disabused of his ambitions, but his temper remained the same, and, his conjugal vocation notwithstanding, he still couldn’t find a bride. More than one would have would have accepted him with great pleasure; he was so circumspect he lost them all."Genre: short storyLength: 4,000 wordsTranslated from Portuguese (Brazil) by Juan LePuen

"I found myself in the grips of an obsession: death, death, death. All of the dead in my family were turning up in my thoughts. My good grandfather, my little brother, an old maid whose body I had seen lain out—they reappeared before my eyes, lying on black biers, as pale as wax, with sunken eyes,...

"Liberty, fraternity, equality! . . . What noble heart could take fright at the triumph of such Christian principles?" So the narrator of Oller's ironic tale of bitter disillusionment with youthful ideals asks himself only shortly before a mob of unruly revolutionaries comes to burn and pillage...

A classified ad is offering a large reward for the return of a lost greyhound. Mendonça, a single young doctor who has found the dog, makes his way to a house on Rua de Mata-cavalos, where the reward he ultimately collects is much different from the monetary one mentioned in the classifieds.Translated from Portuguese (Brazil) by Juan LePuenGenre: short storyLength: 9,000 words

Read in French"The Philter" is a dual-language edition of "Le Philtre," Stendhal's brief tale of a young Spanish woman's inexplicable passion for a circus rider from Naples. Both the original French tale and the newly translated English version are hyperlinked to facilitate swift...

Roberto and his wife have just dropped off their children at the station and are now alone with each other in their suddenly quiet house. This brief tale, left unfinished, is one of Svevo's most terrifying. Translated from Italian (2012) by Juan LePuen Genre: short story Length: 5,900 words

In Montevideo, on shore leave, a naval officer comes across a burning dressmaker's shop. Ever the chivalrous gentleman, he ignores the flames and the smoke and rushes up the stairs to the burning workshop. Translated (2012) by Juan LePuen Genre: short story Length: 1,800 words

It's Christmas Eve, 1861 or 1862. Seventeen-year-old Nogueira, a native of the provinces living in Rio de Janeiro for his studies, has arranged with a neighbor to go to midnight mass. Into the parlor where he is waiting up alone walks Dona Conceição, the thirty-year-old wife of the...

Inácio Ramos is a cellist. His young wife, daughter of a poor shopkeeper, does not understand his art. She is drawn instead to popular music and those who play it, above all to a mediocre law student who is back in Rio de Janeiro for the holidays. Machado de Assis, Brazil's greatest...

Translator J. LePuen offers a book of stories of his own. In "Kamikaze," a high-school student discovers the surprising lengths his classmates will go to to ensure they get passing grades. In "Separate but Equal," a basketball game nearly triggers a race riot. Other stories follow their protagonists...

Juan LePuen draws on Primo Levi’s notions of purity and impurity to examine the work, both literary and extra-literary, of the Peruvian Julio Ramón Ribeyro. He argues that Ribeyro’s work is characterized by its impurity and that this trait ultimately affects the reception of his work. He likewise...

The Romanian writer Panait Istrati (1884-1935) was once among the most popular writers in Europe. He and his work fell out of favor after he published an early denunciation (written with Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine) of the Soviet regime. _Mediterranean (Sunrise)_, completed in March 1934,...