Search results for ""Author Joao Almino""

Majnun lives his life online in his grandparents’ well-appointed home in the Brazilian capital. No school, no work—just bored in Brasília. After falling in love with a married woman, however, he flees to Madrid with friends, intent on, well … something. Writing a historical novel about medieval Spain? Or perhaps converting to Islam and heading to North Africa? As Majnun floats through the crowds of Catholics, through encounters with legitimate medievalists, through romances, friendships, mosques, and palaces, his vague interests threaten to boil over into violent, even deadly action.

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Isolating these moments in his memory and attempting to analyze them much like a lens, he envisions "a haiku stripped of rhetoric that captures only what is in front of the camera." Yet, deprived of his sight, the photographer now must reconstruct his experiences as a series of affective snapshots, a diary of his emotions as they were frozen on this or that day. The result, then, is not the description of a remembered image, but of the emotional memory the image evokes. Joao Almino here gives us a trenchant portrait of an artist trying to close the gap between objective vision and sentimental memory, leafing through a catalog of his accomplishments and failures in a violent, artificial, universal city, and trying to reassemble the puzzle that was his life.

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"Free City" is master storyteller Joao Almino's third novel to focus on the city of Bras?lia, the social swirl of its early years, when contractors, corporate profiteers, idealists, politicians, mystical sects, and even celebrities mingled--including Aldous Huxley, Fidel Castro, Andre Malraux, John Dos Passos, Elizabeth Bishop, and many others. Putting past and present into direct conflict, the story takes the form of a blog, even incorporating comments from other bloggers, each with their vested interests, each with new reasons for spinning fictions of their own.

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