Letters from a Seducer - Hilda Hilst

Hilda Hilst (1930-2004) was a Brazilian poet, novelist and playwright. The only daughter of a coffee planter who suffered from schizophrenia, her parents' poor mental health and conservatism would leave a deep mark on her writing, with the themes of insanity and sexual liberation running throughout her prolific work. In the mid-1960s she built a rural property called the House of the Sun, where she surrounded herself with other artists and lived the rest of her days, writing and winning many of her native country's most prestigious literary prizes. \nJohn Keene (b. 1965) is a writer, translator, and professor from St Louis, Missouri. Educated at Harvard and NYU, he is chair of the African American and African Studies department at Rutgers University Newark. He has published fiction and poetry, including the collection Punks (2022), which won the National Book Award. In 2018 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.\n