PEN America’s journal Glossolalia advocates for writers with limited access to the global reading community. By publishing works from lesser-translated languages, they connect storytellers to audiences eager for a vivid, mind-expanding look at experiences unlike their own. As the eyes of the world turn to the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Glossolalia‘s forthcoming issue turns its focus to “Women Writing Brazil,” highlights of which are excerpted below.
In [this issue], you’ll discover writers whose work you’ll want desperately to know better. They will reveal to you unimagined landscapes—on the Amazon, in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, in São Paulo, in the heart or in the imagination—that will mark you indelibly. These pieces do what literature should and must: they open up the world.
–Claire Messud
João and Raimunda: On The Injustices of Brazil’s Belo Monte Project
Eliane Brum, trans. Diane Grosklaus Whitty
“When victims suffer violence that goes unacknowledged, it inflicts even greater pain on them, and they are violated all over again by a feeling of unreality.”
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Trans. Hilary Kaplan
“mouthwatering / now a bit emotional / now i’m a professional / now it’s your turn”
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Seminar on the Extermination of Rats
Lygia Fagundes Telles, trans. Eric M. B. Becker
“A thick wall as though a bag of rubbery rocks had been emptied from the roof now rolled in from every side in a rumble of tiny legs, squeaking, and hundreds of black
eyes aglow.”
