Richard Zenith

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Education By Stone: Selected Poems

Richard Zenith; Jopo Cabral de Melo Neto

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The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive

Richard Zenith; Fernando Pessoa; Antonio Tabucchi

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The Inquisitors' Manual

Richard Zenith; Antonio Lobo Antunes

In his eleventh novel, Antonio Lobo Antunes, one of the great European literary masters, chronicles the decadence not just of a family but of an entire society -- a society morally and spiritually vitiated by four decades of totalitarian rule. Senhor Francisco, a once powerful state minister and a personal friend of the Portuguese dictator Salazar, is incapacitated by a stroke, and as he spends his last days in a nursing home in Lisbon, he reviews his life and his loves. His son Joao, raised by the housekeeper, grows up to be good-hearted but totally inept, so that his ruthless in-laws easily defraud him of his father's farm. The minister's illegitimate daughter, Paula, whom he had with the cook and who was raised by a childless widow in another town, is ostracized after the Revolution due to her father's position in Salazar's regime. The emotional turmoil enveloping Francisco's family finally catches up with him when the Revolution ends the forty-two years of the dictatorship, and the old regime tumbles like a castle of cards. Senhor Francisco, more paranoid than ever, remains a large but empty shadow of his seeming omnipotence. The Inquisitors' Manual is at once an inquiry into the difficult coexistence of self-affirmation and tenderness toward others, and a powerful examination of a totalitarian sensibility. "what impels the reader through the hopeless, loveless landscape he paints is the sheer energy of the writing....." -- Margaret Jull Costa, Times Literary Supplement "The Inquisitors' Manual is a ... terrifying portrait of the moral decrepitude of Portugal during the [Salazar] dictatorship." -- El Periódico (Madrid)

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The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa

Richard Zenith; Fernando Pessoa

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The Natural Order of Things

Richard Zenith; Antonio Lobo Antunes

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Log Book: Selected Poems

Richard Zenith; Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

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Act of the Damned

Richard Zenith; Antonio Lobo Antunes

As the socialist revolution closes in, a once-wealthy Portuguese family is accused of "economic sabotage". They must escape across the border to Spain, then on to Brazil - but the family is bankrupt, financially and spiritually. The patriarch, Diogo, lies dying, while his rapacious offspring rifle through his belongings, searching for his will. Told through a rippling overlay of voices, Act of the Damned circles closer and closer to the revelation of the diabolical immorality of Diogo's greedy son-in-law Rodrigo ... who has fathered a child on his own bastard daughter and who is closing in on Diogo's crumbling estate. In the oppressive autumn heat, the characters' schemes ebb and flow in an atmosphere of decrepit elegance, tarnished silver, and rotting brocade. When the moment of departure finally arrives, the scene shifts from chaos to vacuum and Rodrigo finds himself no longer at the center of the group but firmly, terrifyingly, outside and alone.

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Other editions: 1993

One Hundred Thirteen Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems

Richard Zenith

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Book of Disquietude

Richard Zenith; Fernando Pessoa

First published in 1982, this is the "factless autobiography" of Bernardo Soares, one of the 72 literary personae or "heteronyms" with which Fernando Pessoa created the theatre of his absence. The circular text returns again and again to a protagonist desperate to find out who he is.

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