Glory and Its Litany of Horrors (Paperback or Softback)

From Fernanda Torres, the celebrated Brazilian actress and bestselling author of The End, comes a riotous tragicomedy of a famed actor’s path from national sex symbol to cult icon to raving madman after a disastrous performance as King Lear.

Mario Cardoso’s meteoric rise to fame begins in the early sixties, when the promise of sex and revolution permeates the Rio air. But as he conquers the stage, arthouse cinema, and primetime TV, the fever and the decadence of stardom take their toll, and middle-aged Mario finds himself with an ebbing reputation, hairline, and bank account. He needs a royal comeback.

Enter King Lear. Mario’s turn as Shakespeare’s mad monarch goes well until he’s overtaken by a fit of laughter that gets more demented with each performance. Forced to cancel the show, he’s confronted with his mother’s unstaged madness―she’s now convinced that Mario is in fact her long-departed husband. Broke and desperate, Mario signs on for an evangelical network production: Sodoma. Yet, as low as he’s fallen, Mario’s final set is one he never imagined.

With the wicked humor and fleet-footed pace that made her novel The End a runaway bestseller in Brazil, Fernanda Torres’s Glory and its Litany of Horrors is a razor-sharp take on the uneasy marriage of Art and the marketplace, and on the profession of acting in all its horror and glory.

Fernanda Torres was born in 1965 in Rio de Janeiro. The daughter of actors, she was raised backstage. Fernanda has built a solid career as an actress and dedicated herself equally to film, theater, and TV since she was 13 years old, and has received many awards, including Best Actress at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. Over the last twenty years, she has written and collaborated on film scripts and adaptations for theater. She began to write regularly for newspapers and magazines in 2007 and is now a columnist for the newspaper Folha de São Paulo and the magazine Veja-Rio and contributes to the magazine Piauí. Her debut novel, The End, has sold more than 200,000 copies in Brazil.

Eric M. B. Becker is a writer, literary translator, and editor of Words without Borders. He is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Commission, and the Louis Armstrong House Museum. In 2014, he earned a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of a collection of short stories from the Portuguese by Neustadt Prize for International Literature winner and 2015 Man Booker International Finalist Mia Couto (due out in early 2019 from Biblioasis). He has also published translations of numerous writers from Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa, including, Noemi Jaffe, Elvira Vigna, Paulo Scott, Martha Batalha, Paulo Coelho, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Current book projects include work by Djaimila Pereira de Almeida, Alice Sant’Anna, Fernanda Torres, and Lygia Fagundes Telles (NEA Fellowship 2019), among others. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Literary Hub, Freeman’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other publications. He has served on the juries of the ALTA National Translation Award and the PEN Translation Prize.