Teeth under the Sun

A modern-day Don Quixote and an exile in his own hometown, the protagonist of Teeth under the Sun is kept from writing by a conspiracy (real? Imagined?) designed to prevent him from revealing the truth about the town's strange status quo and violent past. In a place where people have abandoned their houses for tiny apartments in the confines of new high-rises, the narrator walks the almost empty streets, remembering better times and meeting figures from his past: his ex-wife, his son, writers, friends, and revolutionaries. And all of this is interspersed with his memories of the movies. Fact and fiction, past and present, all meet in this story of the narrator's attempts to engage more fully with a modern world forcing him into isolation.

Ignácio de Loyola Brandão began his career writing film reviews and went on to work for one of the principal newspapers in São Paulo. Initially banned in Brazil, his novel Zero, which is also published by Dalkey Archive Press, went on to win the prestigious Brasilia Prize and become a controversial best-seller. Brandão is the author of more than a half-dozen works of fiction, including Anonymous Celebrity and Angel of Death, both of which are forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press.

A native of Brazil, translator Cristina Ferreira-Pinto Bailey did her graduate studies at Tulane University and now teaches at Texas State University in San Marcos.