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Fitzcarraldo kicks off new classics list with de Andrade 'modernist masterpiece'
Fitzcarraldo Editions is launching a classics list next spring, with the first title to be 1928 Brazilian epic "modernist masterpiece" Macunaíma: The Hero With No Character by Mário de Andrade, translated by Katrina Dodson.
The novel, which is a stalwart of the Brazilian canon, will feature a foreword by John Keene, winner of the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize.
Publisher Jacques Testard acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Declan Spring at New Directions, which will publish in North America simultaneously.
Macunaíma follows the adventures of the shapeshifting Macunaíma and his brothers as they leave their home in the northern Amazon for a whirlwind tour of Brazil. "Having lost a magic amulet, the hero and his brothers journey to São Paulo to retrieve the talisman that has fallen into the hands of an Italo-Peruvian captain of industry—who is also a cannibal giant," the synopsis reads. "Written over six delirious days—the fruit of years of study—Macunaíma magically synthesises dialect, folklore, anthropology, mythology, flora, fauna and pop culture to examine Brazilian identity."
De Andrade (1893–1945) was a poet, novelist, critic, piano teacher, ethnomusicologist and a leading figure in Brazilian culture. He was a central instigator of the 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week), which marked a new era of modernism. He spent much of his life pioneering the study and preservation of Brazilian folk heritage and was the founding director of São Paulo’s Department of Culture.
The classics list will include fiction and non-fiction, in English and in translation, with four books slated to appear in 2023. The first non-fiction title will be Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death, a day-by-day recounting of her mother’s death, which will appear in June, with the translator to be confirmed. Testard acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Joanna Marston at Rosica Colin, acting on behalf of French publishing house Gallimard.
Other acquisitions include two novels by Witold Gombrowicz, including Possessed, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones directly into English for the first time, and with a foreword by Olga Tokarczuk; The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti, translated by Peter Filkins; and Lili is Crying and Twenty Minutes of Silence by Hélène Bessette, translated by Kate Briggs.
Ray O’Meara, the publisher’s art director and designer of the original series, is developing the house aesthetic with a new format in the custom serif typeface. The new series will mirror the press’s trademark blue covers for fiction and white covers for non-fiction.
"After eight years of contemporary publishing, I am very excited to be launching a classics list. The idea is that this list grows out of our publishing to date, going back in time through the influences and affinities of the authors we already publish. The hope is that the classics will contribute to the imaginary constellation that constitutes our catalogue, with resonances emerging between books and authors across space and time. In due course, the classics list might constitute an alternative, partial and entirely subjective history of 20th-century literature, through which the foundations for our contemporary publishing might become discernible."
