Presentation In its five years of existence, Apicuri has published both fiction and non-fiction, and has brought to light reflections, essays and dissertations by Brazilian authors and researchers in the field of Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts and International Relations. This initiative amplifies the exchange between academy and the larger public in these areas, while proportioning access to diversified materials for readers to debate and contemplate. Additionally, Apicuri seeks to offer its readers high quality books, by young and renowned authors, in its fiction imprint.
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Lêdo Ivo
The Repeat Student
Synopsis
Author: Lêdo Ivo 152 Pages ISBN: 978-85-61022-95-2 Rights available
Ledo Ivo is internationally admired; his books have been translated into English, Spanish, French, Dutch, and even Greek. Deceased in December 2012, at 88 years of age, he received innumerable homages in Europe, as well as in Mexico and in the United States. This posthumous book presents his celebrated short story “The Repeat Student” together with poems, recollections of his youth, travel notes, confessions, literary remarks, memorandum between the author and his editor, and one of his last written pieces, “Madame du Deffand”, in which Ledo Ivo narrates his search for the letters of this extraordinary feminine personality, known in the Parisian salons of the 18th century.
Excerpt In moments of euphoria, João Cabral de Melo Neto lamented that I had not died in my twenties. He held that my poems from As imaginações, Ode e elegia, Ode ao crepúsculo and Acontecimento do soneto would make me a Castro Alves of the twentieth century, or a tropical Rimbaud. Despite this glorious gesture and his touching zeal for my posterity, I modestly replied that I would rather live to a grand old age. In my defense, contradicting his lethal and fraternal desire for his friend and fellow traveler, applied to imagining such an august posthumous state, I’d retorted that I preferred to be the Victor Hugo of Maceió and exhale my final breath after turning eighty. And to alleviate his disappointment over my earth-bound journey, I further commented that had I died in the bloom of my youth, we would not be here, in this long night extending over the São João farm in yet another stage of our interminable and heated dialog – while he fervently emptied a stout bottle of whiskey, and I slowly sipped an austere and much-deserved French wine.
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fiction
O Aluno Relapso
fiction
Paula Bajer Fernandes
Viagem Sentimental ao Japão Sentimental Trip to Japan Synopsis
Author: Paula Bajer Fernandes 240 Pages ISBN: 978-85-61022-94-5 Rights available
There are those who speak of books without ever having read them; those who speak of trips without ever having made them. The lie nourishes human relations, and it is not different for the protagonist of this intriguing debut novel: Annette is a stubborn fugitive. She travels to escape herself — without ever leaving her desk at a travel agency. New York, Paris, Rome, no matter where. She invents and convinces that she has visited countless places, plausible and imaginable, providing operational and touristic detail for her clients to rest assured. A nomad of the imagination, she will see her façade crumble with the arrival of an unexpected client who wishes to go to Japan.
Excerpt Travel is a kind of displacement that still doesn’t come easily. My body doesn’t like to stray far from home. Except that I’m attracted to the imaginary act of moving. To another continent, for example. Another continent of myself. Displacements of spirit. Or mental displacements. I braced. I departed. I didn’t want so much distance. Things don’t happen like we expect. Everything started when I felt like a stranger in my own home. I didn’t belong. It had always been like that. […] I couldn’t spend my entire life among letters, written and thought, with few friends and few words, spoken and heard. I couldn’t spend my life like a character from a European ship, enchanted with our nature. I couldn’t live my life like Robinson Crusoe. I was forced to look for a job. Circumstances. I was inexperienced; all I did was read and face my computer. Initially, my family preferred that I stay home. Afterwards, they wanted me to leave. Parents are surprised when we grow up. We are surprised when we grow up. Radical estrangement. I didn’t have friends, real or virtual. All of a sudden, my father decided that I should start working. [...] Maybe it would be good. Leaving home every day at the same time. Arriving home every day at the same time. Having work colleagues. And a salary. After sending some twenty applications [...], I found one that needed someone who would exchange dedication and hard work for little money. I landed at a travel agency. I was interviewed by the owner himself – a small agency. His name was, and still is, Marcos Paulo. Older, about 45. Almost handsome. Thin, at least.
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Por Enquanto Agora For A While Now Synopsis
Author: Maria Christina Drummond Monteiro de Castro 280 Pages ISBN: 978-85-61022-69-3 Rights available
Belo Horizonte, mid 20th century. Traditional Catholic middleclass. A time of large families with children, relatives, and friends gathered around. A time of perfumed white bed sheets, kept in locked drawers. This is Maria Christina Monteiro de Castro’s Proustian journey, her first book, mixing fiction and reality. It’s a late debut novel from a 70-year-old woman, who, in a style loaded with powerful phrasing, reveals a profounder Brazil located between utopia and repression, a revolution of customs and family traditions. Over a period of more than thirty years, this novel covers disturbances, ruptures and unimaginably painful losses.
Excerpt Like my sisters, I was born in a good wooden bed, to parents who loved each other, in a large bedroom of a middle class home in the neighborhood of Lourdes. My mother’s other births had also been the responsibility of Dona Olívia. Under the command of her energetic hands — buckets of boiling water, fresh towels and sheets, alcohol and flame sterilized scissors, a lot of sweat and a few screams — it worked and we were born. […] Thousands of little beings saw the world for the first time just like this; hundreds were the baptismal goddaughters or sons of that soft spoken accent woman — graduate of the Santa Casa in Rio — who classified mothers in three types: the doleful ones, the resigned ones, and the good birthers ones. The last, endowed with wide hips, robust legs, strong voice, and the pleasure of engendering. One auntie swore that my mother was a classic example of the third type, because she kept her breathing and steady self-control during the many hours of labor, and gave birth without moaning or excesses to one baby a year.
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fiction
Maria Christina Drummond Monteiro de Castro
social sciences
Nadia Nogueira
Macedo Soares & Bishop Self-Inventions in Love Stories Synopsis
Author: Nadia Nogueira 264 Pages ISBN: 978-85-61022-00-6 Rights available
Macedo Soares and Bishop met each other in New York in 1942. In 1951 Bishop went to Rio and her initial enchantment for the natural environment intensified with Macedo Soares’ declaration of love and the care Brazilians had with her after an allergic crisis provoked by a cashew fruit. From 1951 to 1967 these women constructed a love relationship marked by their constant reinvention of the self. Macedo Soares supervised the landscaping of Flamengo park, the Aterro; Elizabeth wrote a lot during these years, perhaps her most prolific episode. The book highlights the historical silence to which female homoerotic relations were subjected, and deconstructs the legal medical discourse that diagnosed women involved in these relationships as pernicious to society.
Excerpt The masculine construction of lesbianism created by chiefs of police, doctors, hygienists and jurors – sheathed in shocking images and metaphors – erased all other possibilities of naming this form of affectionate and sexual relationship. The lesbian was constructed out of a misogynistic and exclusionary discourse as a phantom figure, in the character of the butch, the tribade, the introvert, the vampire, women who supposedly distance themselves from the feminine image created by men. Despite the goal of finding a singular quality in Macedo Soares and Bishop’s relationship, they did not invent a distinctive model of loving relationship since there are others who predated them in Brazil or in other countries: the American writer Gertrude Stein and her secretary Alice Toklas; the celebrated couple, Mary Fields and Jane Adams, who was famous for telegraphing hotels in search of a queen size bed for her and her companion in the 1920s in the United States. Meanwhile, Macedo Soares and Bishop stood out for being women who belonged to the elite, for being out with those they lived with, for finding themselves in a pretty conservative era which the dominant discourse of doctors and lawyers constructed the view of loving relationships between women as pernicious to society, made up of sick people who needed medical treatment. Thus, this loving relationship between two women raises questions about crystalized representations constituted and woven through the period that is the focus of this study, and this historical investigation.
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Fernanda Pequeno
Lygia Pape and Hélio Oiticica: Dialog and Frictions Synopsis
Author: Fernanda Pequeno 128 Pages ISBN: 978-85-8317-008-2 Rights available
Fernanda Pequeno compares dialog and frictions in the visual poetics of artists Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape to highlight similarities, point out differences and note moments of convergence and divergence between their languages. Of the issues that permeate the analysis are political and social conflicts – both artists worked during the 60s and 70s, a politically loaded moment in the history of Brazil. This interfered with and guided both artists, who both ended up introjecting a certain contradiction or ambiguity into their work. Pape and Oiticica opted for a highly experimental line of artistic production, and its political and transgressive character arose through the negation of the status quo and through their faith in Brazilian joviality.
Excerpt “Discovery as foundation” decries a “new” world, however, and the abandonment of the old. From there would emerge a taste for the provisional, too, so latent in the work of Pape and Oiticica. This attraction to a certain unpredictablility was the mark of a characteristic Brazilian inventive and improvisational capacity. [...] the roughness of the hardboard woods used in many of Oiticica’s pieces and his use of tones and tints (rather than pure color) in others, are examples of how he has opted for the intermediary to serve as a point of departure. With Pape, we see value given to the fragment, the scene, the episode; since, her performances and propositions are always circumstantial and dependant on a kind of instability or irregularity. This sudden and unexpected departure into a field of activity that was very fertile, especially in its power to deautomatize, has been well exploited by the artist. Her works are inclusive of a diversity that makes them dilate constantly, internally. And thus, for both Pape and Oticica, the apocalypse seems to be a hypothesis.
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arts
Lygia Pape e Hélio Oiticica: conversações e fricções poéticas
arts
Zalinda Cartaxo
Pintura e Realidade Painting and Reality
Synopsis
Author: Zalinda Cartaxo 216 Pages ISBN: 978-85-61022-72-3 Rights available
From an observation of the reevaluation of the Real in Contemporary Art, the author restricts herself to an area of figurative painting that she defines as Architectural Realism. Zalinda Cartaxo develops her analysis comparing the works of two painters —the Brazilian Adriana Varejão, and the Portuguese José Lourenço. Adriana Varejão, in her series Saunas e Banhos (Saunas and Baths), presents a style of painting that privileges interior and intimate spaces. Antagonically, José Lourenço shows the façades that emphasize exteriority, in the collective. They both resort to using the artifice of the vanishing point perspective as a strategy to affirm the subject in the world.
Excerpt Two questions arise when you discuss the theme of architectural realism in contemporary figurative painting. The first relates to the reasons why artists use architecture as a means to reflect reality; the second concerns the trajectories taken by art nowadays that have enabled a segment of painting to salvage figuration in a realist and practical way. Historically the relationship between painting and architecture has always been direct. Since the 1960’s, the manifest plurality of art and the dissolution of boundaries between the different disciplines (drawing, painting, photography, architecture, video, etc.) allowed painting to become explicit in its dialog with architecture. According to Lygia Clark, architecture should be considered a module that regulates space, since “the materials themselves, with their authentic lines of emendation, enable the artist to change the entire surface of a floor, using the same line as in a graphic module of a composition.” […]. Author’s biography: Zalinda Cartaxo holds an MA in history of art and PhD in arts (UFRJ). She works as a professor on the field of visual arts.
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Beatriz Pimenta Velloso
Synopsis
Author: Beatriz Pimenta Velloso 152 Pages ISBN: 978-85-61022-61-7 Rights available
Established storytellers, Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg find their narratives in the exchange of experiences. In the telling of events generated by encounters with the Other, a story is woven in each written piece. Revealing and condensing narrative possibilities through exercises that interpret and mediate the world, the duo invents points of view for communicable experiences. They introduce marginalized groups through video installations and collaboratively develop projects that address subjectivity and stimulate us to reflect on the mechanisms of exclusion present in our cultural framework.
Excerpt In the work of Dias & Riedweg there is, to a greater or lesser degree, an invitation for the spectator to experiment seeing from the point of view of the other. By identifying with the testimonials of interviewees, the spectator realizes how his own life is also different. Maurício Dias is from Rio de Janeiro, and Walter Riedweg is from Lucerne, Switzerland. They have worked together since 1993 in Argentina, Egypt, South Africa, Japan, America, Europe, and in various cities in Brazil. According to Dias, his experience as an immigrant in 1985, when he moved to Europe, after finishing his studies in Engraving at the Fine Arts School in Rio de Janeiro, was essential. By arriving there, as soon as he realized that his money was worth little, and if he wanted to stay he’d have to work, he joined a group of Brits who were looking for work in vineyards; collecting grapes in the South of France was his first job as an illegal alien in Europe. Riedweg was born and raised in Switzerland. After studying music and theater, he moved to New York, where he staged many plays and participated in performance workshops. He met Dias when he was visiting Switzerland, and they discovered they held similar concerns about art and, without making any concrete decisions, began to discuss their ideas […] Author’s biography: Beatriz Pimenta Velloso holds an MA in visual languages and PhD in Culture and Image (UFRJ). She works on the field of visual arts.
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arts
Dias & Riedweg
social sciences
Arthur Ituassu
O Brasil Depois da Guerra Fria Brazil After the Cold War Synopsis
Author: Arthur Ituassu 160 Pages ISBN: 978-85-61022-82-2 Rights available
Ituassu combines a solid academic background in Politics and International Relations with journalistic experience to narrate, with mastery, the profound transformations that took place in Brazil and the world after 1989. This year marked the confluence of many tendencies and the beginning of so many others, shaping the political life of nations. Complex events and processes are interlaced to make up an indispensible picture to understanding the world. The author shows that the Cold War was not only a conflict between world powers but also defined the political mentalities and cultures in countries far from the center of the dispute. This book tells the true story of post-Cold War Brazil and can bring light to similar studies of other nations.
Excerpt The first premise of this book is that the year 1989 would hold a precious political debate. After all, the country had just recently come out of an authoritarian military regime of nearly two decades and found itself in the middle of an unprecedented social, political and economic crisis. This was the context for the first direct presidential elections of the new Brazilian democracy, the New Republic. Brazil had come back from the death of Tancredo Neves, one of the principal names of political opposition to the military and, in 1984, was one of the leaders of the movement Diretas Já, demanding direct elections. Tancredo would have been elected president by indirect vote in 1985, with mass popular support. Sick, however, he would not take office. With his death, the vice-president-elected, José Sarney, a conservative, assumed the position and took the country from hope to national decline in merely three years, with his economic plan, Plano Cruzado, in January 1986. The population saw inflation defeat successive attempts by government to control prices until the beginning of the Plano Real in 1994, during Itamar Franco’s presidency. […] On the international scene, radical transformations erupted, like the end of the Cold War, and the intense technical revolution that integrated nations and markets. Beneath it all there was a structure that had defined international politics since the end of the Second World War. In fact, 1989 was a year of change. In January, for example, in Hungary under an Iron Curtain, the government approved a law that guaranteed free trade. […]
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Arthur Bernardes do Amaral
The Triple Frontier and the War on Terror Synopsis
Author: Arthur Bernardes do Amaral 312 Pages ISBN: 978-85-61022-27-3 Rights available
This book is a study of the political disputes that occurred around alleged international terrorism activities or financing in the region where the borders of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay meet. It is an analysis of the political discourse that tries to link this frontier area with the image of a potential locus of threat to United States security. After a brief introduction about the area, this work goes on to address George W. Bush’s foreign policy, the historical ties between the United States and political terrorism and, finally, the ways in which Latin America has been inserted into a North American security agenda. In this last part of the book, the political disputes involving the triple frontier between 1992 and 2008 are comprehensively mapped.
Excerpt In 1992, we heard the first official reference by the United States government to an alleged presence of a terrorist group, with an international profile, in South America. This same year, a document, titled Patterns of Global Terrorism, touches on the attempt made against the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and first mentions a possible Hezbollah presence on the South American continent. Before this key event, the only forms of political violence categorized as acts of terrorism by the US government allude to separate attacks perpetrated by insurgent South American groups against the interests and/or citizens of the United States based in South America. They made reference to the aggressions by groups of an essentially national character, both in their political motivation and their sphere of activity. In this context, what stands out are the cases of Colombia, Peru and, to a lesser degree, Bolivia. This picture radically changed after the 1992 attack on Argentina, at which point the United States government took steps in a progressive process of securitizing international terrorism in South America. Author’s biography: Arthur Bernardes do Amaral holds a BA in Social Sciences (UFRJ) and an MA in International Relations (PUC-Rio). Currently he is a professor of the Institute of International Relations at PUC-Rio and Adjunct Coordinator in Contemporary International Relations.
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social sciences
A Tríplice Fronteira e a Guerra ao Terror
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