Condense mist and fathom and fashion a face. And if that’s not enough to get you interested, just check out this wild prose: This book is basically about a widowed woman who lives under the stairs in her house, has masks hanging in her window, and tries to scare all the kids by yelling crazy shit at them. These are books that blow apart the nature of fiction and how to represent consciousness, and do so in a way that is mesmerizingly strange and beautiful.īut I’m really not sure how to write about Hilst. I read it a few weeks ago along with Água Viva by Hilst’s friend and compatriot Clarice Lispector, and was struck by a) how well these two books go together, and b) how no one writes like Lispector and Hilst wrote. I wish I could write a review of this book. The Obscene Madame D by Hilda Hilst, translated from the Portuguese by Nathanaël in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araujo (Nightboat Books) And besides, for those of you playing along at home, this list of non- BTBA books might give you some clues as to what did make it. This isn’t to say that I disagree with the list of finalists-I think it’s pretty spectacular, and damn, is narrowing it down to 25 books a difficult task-just that I think there are a few other titles that deserve some sort of honorable mention. So, over the next five days I’m going to highlight some of them. That said, looking over the complete list of fiction titles, there are a few books that I thought for sure would be on there, but aren’t. My hope-which seems to have worked-was to diversify the group of finalists a bit, allowing books that didn’t get quite as much play to get some attention.

In contrast to years past, this time I recommended that the nine judges agree on 16 titles, then each pick one “wild card”-a book that they personally love, but that didn’t make the list selected by the group. This year’s judges-click here for the complete list-did a spectacular job selecting the 25 best works of fiction in translation published last year. Next Tuesday, March 5th, at 10 am(ish), we will be unveiling this year’s BTBA Fiction Longlist.

The obscene madame d