The English-language debut of one of Brazil’s leading writers of the twentieth century The Obscene Madame D is the first work by acclaimed Brazilian author Hilda Hilst to be published in English. Radically irreverent and formally impious, this novel portrays an unyielding radical intelligence, a sixty-year-old woman who decides to live in the recess under the stairs. In her diminutive space, Madame D—for dereliction—relives the perplexity of her recently deceased lover who cannot comprehend her rejection of common sense, sex, and a simple life, in favor of metaphysical speculations that he supposes to be delusional and vain. "If Lispector's psychotic heroines careen towards Mars, Hilst's Madame D, in her flight from the body's 'unparalleled glimmer', implodes. Her god is too small, too obscene to halt her descent into Hell. This brief, lyrical and scalding account of a mind unhinged recalls the passionate urgency of Artaud and de Sade's waking dreams in which sex and death are forever conjoined and love's 'vivid time' irretrievably lost." —Rikki Ducornet "Like her friend and admirer Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst was a passionate explorer of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the obscene, and shows, in this discomfiting, hypnotic work, just how rarely those categories are what they seem. The translation is excellent - what a rare relief." —Benjamin Moser

Polêmico, subversivo e implacável da primeira à última página, este livro deu início à fase obscena da autora de Júbilo, memória, noviciado da paixão . Aos sessenta anos de idade, quatro décadas depois de estrear como poeta e inconformada com a tímida recepção de sua obra, Hilda Hilst tomou uma atitude radical. Em 1990, com O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby, resolveu se despedir da "literatura séria" e se dedicar a escrever "adoráveis bandalheiras". A narradora, Lori, é uma menina de oito anos que decide se prostituir, com o consentimento dos pais, e registrar tudo—tudo mesmo—em seu diário. Com humor ácido e autoconsciência brutal, ela relata os desenlaces da sedução e o prazer que o dinheiro lhe traz. Não à toa, a premissa escandalosa rendeu as mais diversas e enfáticas interpretações dos críticos e continua despertando a ávida curiosidade dos leitores. No posfácio a esta edição, a psicanalista Vera Iaconelli destaca como Hilda Hilst, ao questionar nossas certezas e ultrapassar o limite da razão, escreveu uma obra que impressiona pela ousadia e atualidade.

In Letters from a Seducer, Hilst describes the everyday life of Karl, a wealthy, erudite, and amoral man who seeks an answer to his incomprehension of life through sex. Karl writes and sends twenty provocative letters to Cordelia, his chaste sister. The letters' text becomes intertwined with the life of the poet Stamatius, who finds Karl's letters in the trash. It quickly dawns upon the reader that both men are in fact the same person albeit at different points of time and circumstance. This mirror play is the guiding trope for a uniquely grand work.