Amora

From an emerging talent comes an exquisite collection of stories exploring the complexity of love between women, each a delicate piece in a mosaic transcending the boundaries of literary romance.

Amora dares explore the way women love each other—the atrophy and healing of the female spirit in response to sexual desire and identity. These thirty-three short stories and poems, crafted with a deliberate delicacy, each capture the candid, private moments of women in love.

Together, these stories and the women who inhabit them reveal an illuminating portrait of the sacred female romance, with all its nuances, complexities, burdens, and triumphs revealed. Violence, sickness, chaos, tenderness, beauty, and freedom adorn these pages in a mosaic of unforgettable moments, including a lesbian granddaughter discovering unexpected commonalities with her grandmother, a teenager’s tryst with her friend after disenchanting sex with a boy, and an old couple’s dreamy Sunday-morning ritual.

Sweeping nearly every major Brazilian literary prize in 2016—including the Prêmio Jabuti and Prêmio Açorianos de Literatura—Amora has propelled Natalia Borges Polesso to the forefront of the international literary world.

Natalia Borges Polesso is from Bento Gonçalves in Brazil. She is a writer and a translator with a PhD in literary theory. She is the author of Cutouts for Photo Album without People (2013), Amora (2015)—which in 2016 won the Prêmio Jabuti, the Jabuti Amazon Reader’s Choice Award, the Book of the Year AGES Award, and the Prêmio Açorianos de Literatura—and Control (2019), among other titles. In 2017, she was one of only two Brazilian authors on the Bogotá39 list, which selects the most promising Latin American authors under thirty-nine.

Julia Sanches is a translator of Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Catalan. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Noemi Jaffe, Daniel Galera, and Geovani Martins, among others. Her shorter translations have appeared in various magazines and periodicals, including Words without Borders, Granta, Tin House, and Guernica.