A Washington Post and Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year
Though known primarily as a poet, Fernando Pessoa, a writer of
"remarkable genius" (Washington Post) wrote prose widely, in several
languages and in every genre. Now newly expanded and revised by
award-winning translator and Pessoa biographer Richard Zenith, The
Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa spans fiction and drama, playful
intellectual inquiry, Platonic dialogue, and bitter intellectual
scrapping between Pessoa and his many literary alter egos
("heteronyms"). In these pieces, the heteronyms launch movements and
write manifestos, and one of them attempts to break up Pessoa's only
known romantic relationship. Also included is a generous selection from
Pessoa's masterpiece The Book of Disquiet. This is an important record
of a crucial part of the literary canon.
"A modern master to rank alongside Joyce, Kafka, Beckett."--Sunday
Times (UK)
"Beautifully translated, compact while appropriately diverse." --Los
Angeles Times
" [A] delightful collection . . . [Pessoa] is the modernist's
modernist: an inspired amalgam of Lewis Carroll, Aristophanes, Erasmus,
Voltaire." --Washington Times