Letters from a Seducer

A wild, grotesque satire of male sexuality and pleasure-seeking from one of Brazil's most important modern writers - part Clarice Lispector, part Marquis de Sade
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'She is a novelist with the fecundity and multivocality of Joyce, with the precision and wit of Sarraute, and yet she is something new under the sun, the poet of "friezes, strips, joyful bands, columbombastic screams." Maybe all women wonder what men would be like, without their posturing and wack, but it seems to me Hilst had more than an inkling' Dodie Bellamy
'Letters of a Seducer seduces the reader with all the strategies available to a fine writer: wit, wonderfully inventive language lushly captured by the translator, an intriguing story-and did I say sexuality that broils and bubbles along at a mad and marvelous intensity? This is a brilliant performance!' Samuel R. Delany
'Consider this your personal message of recommendation from me to you to read Hilda Hilst, as much as you can. . . Letters From a Seducer will make you blush, gasp, become aroused then feel weird about it, laugh a lot. After reading any Hilst your body and mind will make more and less sense to each other. Your verbal and sensorial understandings will alter, you'll slap your thigh and yell at the shock of a line, you'll feel drunk, ungodly and fantastically free.' Holly Pester, author of 'The Lodgers'
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In Letters from a Seducer, Hilst describes the everyday life of Karl, a wealthy, erudite, and amoral man who seeks an answer to his incomprehension of life through sex.
Karl writes and sends twenty provocative letters to Cordelia, his chaste sister. The letters' text becomes intertwined with the life of the poet Stamatius, who finds Karl's letters in the trash, as Hilst constructs an ingenious mirror play between the two that casts strange light on questions of amorality, sexuality and the spirit.
Linguistically rich and endlessly playful, Letters from a Seducer is a work of perverse genius by one of Brazil's greatest modern writers.