Ribeiro’s deft and insinuating storytelling captures the uncanny feeling of slippage. . . . [His writing is] atmospheric and engrossing, and by the end Mr. Ribeiro has proven himself a master of the subtleties of subjectivity.
The Impostor
In “The Impostor,” a man travels with his wife through Italy and recalls a family legend about an uncle who was swallowed by Mt. Vesuvius. Preoccupied by this mysterious event, he grapples with the fallibility of memory and the enigma of time. In “Blue Butterflies of the Amazon,” a matriarch, rendered mute and paralyzed by a stroke, defenselessly observes the shifting dynamics between her only son, his wife, and her husband while they play out their complex intimacies before her.
As the characters of The Impostor wander between worlds and states of mind, Edgard Telles Ribeiro elucidates their situations in surprisingly inventive ways that explore devastating questions of reality, consciousness, and loss.
The Impostor includes two novellas translated from the Portuguese: “The Impostor,” translated by Kim M. Hastings and “Blue Butterflies of the Amazon” translated by Margaret A. Neves.
Big Other Book Award Finalist
Shelf Unbound “Reading List” selection
Literary Hub “New Books” selection
Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781954276161
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781954276154
Watch author Edgard Telles Ribeiro and translator Kim M. Hastings read from the title novella of The Impostor for the Big Other Book Awards.
Brazilian writer Edgard Telles Ribeiro is the author of thirteen works of fiction including three books published in English: I Would Have Loved Him, If I Had Not Killed Him; His Own Man; and The Impostor. He studied cinema at University of California, Los Angeles, worked as film critic for several newspapers before becoming a career diplomat, and has received Brazil’s most prestigious literary prizes, including the Jabuti Prize, Brazilian Academy of Letters Prize, and Brazilian PEN Club Prize. He lives in New York and Rio de Janeiro.
visit author page »Praise for The Impostor
Telles Ribeiro’s title novella is a tour de force that takes place simultaneously in the distant past and in the present, in a seamlessly fractured continuum of time. The second novella is a complex and breathtaking work, rich in feeling, an audacious, dazzling performance. By turns delicate and humorous, wrenching and melancholic, it lays bare the souls of its characters in a manner that I can only call Chekhovian. It is the work of a master.
— Jaime Manrique, author of Cervantes Street and Like This Afternoon Forever
Comical and brooding, enchanting and disturbing, The Impostor triggers a unique free fall into the unnerving craters of the mind.
— Laura Restrepo, author of Delirium and The Divine Boys
[A] brilliant pair of tales. . . . I was amazed at the insights the author shared in these two short novellas.
— Linda Bond, Auntie’s Bookstore (Spokane, WA)