Glory and its Litany of Horrors

by Fernanda Torres

Genres: Hispanic & Latino; Humor & Satire; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From Fernanda Torres, the celebrated Brazilian actress and bestselling author of The End, comes a riotous tragicomedy of a famed actor’s path from national sex symbol to cult icon to raving madman after a disastrous performance as King Lear. Mario Cardoso’s meteoric rise to fame begins in the early sixties, when the promise of sex and revolution permeates the Rio air. He debuts in a Marxist troupe of acting students bent on awakening the masses, tastes glory when a turn in Uncle Vanya renders him a counterculture sex symbol, pushes the limits of method-acting on-stage and off as a degenerate pimp with an older prostitute, and finally cashes in as the star of a primetime soap. But stardom, the fever of acting, and the decadence it affords take their toll, and middle-aged Mario finds himself with an ebbing reputation, hairline, and bank account. He needs a royal comeback. Enter King Lear. Mario’s enactment of Shakespeare’s mad monarch goes well until he’s overtaken by fit of laughter that gets more demented in each performance. He cancels the show only to encounter a more destructive madness: his mother’s, who’s now convinced that Mario is in fact her long-departed husband. Broke and desperate, Mario throws a Hail Mary and signs on for an evangelical network production: Sodoma. Yet, as low as he’s fallen, Mario’s final set is one he never imagined. With the wicked humor and fleet-footed pace that made her novel The End a runaway bestseller in Brazil, Fernanda Torres’s Glory and its Litany of Horrors is a captivating take on the uneasy marriage of Art and the marketplace, and on the profession of acting in all its horror and glory. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Fernanda Torres was born in 1965 in Rio de Janeiro. The daughter of actors, she was raised backstage. Fernanda has built a successful career as an actress and has dedicated herself equally to film, theater, and TV since she was 13 years old. She writes and collaborates on film scripts and adaptations for theater and is also a newspapers and magazine columnist. Her debut novel, The End, sold more than 200,000 copies in Brazil and was translated for publication in several countries including France, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Portugal, Hungary, and the United States. Glory and its Litany of Horrors is her second novel. ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR: Eric M. B. Becker is a writer, literary translator, and editor of Words without Borders. He is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Commission, and the Louis Armstrong House Museum. In 2014, he earned a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of a collection of short stories from the Portuguese by Neustadt Prize for International Literature winner and 2015 Man Booker International Finalist Mia Couto (due out in early 2019 from Biblioasis). He has also published translations of numerous writers from Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa, including, Noemi Jaffe, Elvira Vigna, Paulo Scott, Martha Batalha, Paulo Coelho, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Current book projects include work by Djaimila Pereira de Almeida, Alice Sant’Anna, Fernanda Torres, and Lygia Fagundes Telles (NEA Fellowship 2019), among others. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Literary Hub, Freeman’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other publications. He has served on the juries of the ALTA National Translation Award and the PEN Translation Prize.

Release date: July 23, 2019

Publisher: Restless Books

Print pages: 240