Juan Lepuen: 20 books

"And over the years, in other loves, more real and longer lasting, he never experienced a feeling like that of that Sunday on Rua da Lapa, when he was fifteen years old." Fifteen-year-old Inácio has been sent to work as a runner for the lawyer Borges. Borges's wife, the full-figured...

It's Christmas Eve, 1861 or 1862. Seventeen-year-old Nogueira, a native of the provinces living in Rio de Janeiro for his studies, has arranged with a neighbor to go to midnight mass. Into the parlor where he is waiting up alone walks Dona Conceição, the thirty-year-old wife of the...

Inácio Ramos is a cellist. His young wife, daughter of a poor shopkeeper, does not understand his art. She is drawn instead to popular music and those who play it, above all to a mediocre law student who is back in Rio de Janeiro for the holidays. Machado de Assis, Brazil's greatest...

Juan LePuen draws on Primo Levi’s notions of purity and impurity to examine the work, both literary and extra-literary, of the Peruvian Julio Ramón Ribeyro. He argues that Ribeyro’s work is characterized by its impurity and that this trait ultimately affects the reception of his work. He likewise...

Chekhov noted that if, early in a story, mention was made of a rifle hanging on the wall, it would eventually have to go off. Hanging on the window frame of the schoolhouse in Machado de Assis's "A School Story" is not a rifle, but a paddle, complete with five holes drilled in it. Genre:...

Young José Martins, let out of class early one day, heads home with his uncle and his older sister. On the way, he and his sister try to guess the reason--a party? a birthday? an election victory?--for their unexpected dismissal from class. Genre: short story Length: 3,000 words Translated...

Baron Sigismundo de Kernoberg, a single Swede of thirty-nine, wedded to science alone, suddenly finds himself roped into giving botany lessons to a neighbor's lovely young niece. Translated from Portuguese (Brazil) by Juan LePuen Genre: theater (comedy in one act) Length: 6,900 words

In "Trio in A Minor," Machado's classic tale of a love triangle in Brazilian high society, the intrigue plays out to the tune of the old sonata of the absolute. Brazil's Machado de Assis, the greatest Latin American novelist of the nineteenth century (1839-1908), also excelled...

"Her gaze was not absent, as it had been shortly before; instead, it was fixed on the flowers on the wallpaper that lined the room. She noticed, for the first time, that the flowers were daisies. And she shifted her gaze from one to the next, to see if the pattern was the same, and she found...

It is generally agreed that the sources of Heinrich von Kleist's bloody tales are European, but Juan LePuen argues that, for those interested in the genesis of "Michael Kohlhaas" or "The Earthquake in Chile," such colonial American documents as Hernán Cortés's letters to Charles V make...

"'Now, you’ve played cards with so many people, but only once, a long time ago, have you played with me, écarté. Isn’t écarté the name of that game you taught me? Let’s play a game.' Xavier started laughing." So says Dona Paula to her husband Xavier before...

Translator J. LePuen offers a book of stories of his own. In "Kamikaze," a high-school student discovers the surprising lengths his classmates will go to to ensure they get passing grades. In "Separate but Equal," a basketball game nearly triggers a race riot. Other stories follow their protagonists...

"We'll spend five minutes talking with some people, go from one station to the next with others, live two or three years, or even twenty, with others still. At bottom, though, we do nothing but run into each other (how long doesn't matter), run into each other and always by chance. And always part company." Genre: short story

In which the narrator recounts his experiences as a bag-boy at the neighborhood Albertsons. Genre: short story Words: 2,621