Back to where it all started

And I have a novel coming out next year!!!

Hello dear friends,

I’m writing to you from Bennington, Vermont, the first place I ever got to call home in America. It feels like a lifetime ago I came here from Brazil with no money to study creative writing at Bennington College and started dreaming of a novel about a young foreigner living on an idyllic campus and her shifting relationship to her mother back home through the internet. Now, eight years after graduation, a new residency for writers of color called Outpost brought me back to Bennington to revise this novel in its birthplace. These past couple of weeks, I’ve wandered the same dark hallways, walked the same trails, gone shopping at the same stores from my college days, and I feel I’m a different person now. The campus feels smaller. The trails aren’t as scary. The hallways aren’t even that dark. I’ve grown up a lot in the past eight years, and I have a whole novel to prove it.

And I’m so happy this personal, sad, quiet novel, titled BLUE LIGHT HOURS, is coming out October 2024 from Grove Atlantic in the U.S. and Companhia das Letras/Penguin Random House in Brazil (translated by yours truly). Grove is the dreamy publisher of some of my favorite books (An Unnecessary Woman by Rabbih Alemadine, Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad, Sighseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, to name a few), and Companhia das Letras is the illustrious publisher of most of the Brazilian books I’ve translated (including the recently National Book Award-longlisted The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel, English PEN Translates Award winner The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório, and PEN Translation Prize finalist Moldy Strawberries by Caio Fernando Abreu). The novel already has a home on the Grove website and soon you’ll be able to pre-order it. For now, here’s an excerpt in The New Yorker and another one in Guernica. And here’s the Publishers Marketplace deal announcement:

I’ll be in Southern Vermont until next week, revising this book and hanging out by the mountains of my youth. Now I can enjoy the area in ways I never could as a kid. I can afford to eat out, drive anywhere, stay out late, relax and trust there’s a future for me. So far, I’ve loved browsing through the shelves at Battenkill Books, visiting all the creepy houses where Shirley Jackson lived, feeding carrots to a sweet horse named Cassie, eating maple doughnuts from King Bakery and homemade scones from Moon Scones, doing yoga under an old oak tree, talking with a new friend around a campfire, and sleeping in my tiny cabin in the woods. I’m so so happy to be here again, that the incredibly generous folks at Outpost allowed for that to happen (BIPOC writers, apply by Dec. 15 to spend time here too!), and I hope to keep coming back. I suppose at least in the world of my novel, I’ll be here forever.

Me and my best friend Roma in 2014.

2023.