“One of my methods for developing my own voice in fiction, a process I am taking very slowly and deliberately, is through these very intense encounters with certain writers.”

The authors I prefer are all very different and are not limited to certain genres or even certain time periods.

The transcendent aspect of the psychedelic experience is totally absent.

I translated the novel and still it remains a mystery as to how exactly how this works. Noll thinks more like an experimental filmmaker than a novelist.

I only translate authors whose work already interests me as a reader, and that’s a decision I make based on multiple encounters with an author’s work.

Strength and power in fiction is being able to resist these intoxicating voices, recognizing that they are the signatures of other writers and not one’s own.

Some critics have commented that understanding the specific Brazilian political context of the novel is helpful for reading Quiet Creature. This may be true, but it’s not prerequisite for understanding it.

An easy example would be the Portuguese escuridão:

Jorge Luis Borges was lamenting a variety of Orientalism that was used to measure the alleged authenticity of Argentine and Latin American writers in the midcentury.

One that actually relates to all Latin American literature: that is, not every author is interested in being a representative of his or her national culture on the global stage.

Still, I considered it a tremendous injustice that Noll had not been more widely translated and was determined to rectify it.

English can be tricky because there are so many false cognates, but sometimes, as long the idea conveyed is not wrong, these false cognates can themselves offer synonyms or lead to a better alternative word or phrase in translation.

Jorge Luis Borges had the soapbox and the authority to complain about this myopic understanding of the duty of Latin American writers

Even my editor at Melville House, who championed the project form the outset, told me she was surprised by the response. After this, editors began asking my opinion about which Latin American writers ought to be translated.

I was confident that I could find an editor and the readership for a translation

Dreamlike sequencing is perhaps one of João Gilberto Noll’s most remarkable triumphs in Quiet Creature on the Corner.

This neglect of a very important Brazilian writer is, in my view, the result of Brazil’s relative isolation from what metropolitan tastemakers.

We should like Nature to go no further; we should like it to be finite, like our mind; but this is to ignore the greatness and majesty of the Author of things.

I only translate authors whose work already interests me as a reader, and that’s a decision I make based on multiple encounters with an author’s work.

One that actually relates to all Latin American literature: that is, not every author is interested in being a representative of his or her national culture on the global stage.

The fiction I’ve written and published is certainly inflected by the work of authors I was reading or translating at the time.

I realized I had some cultural capital to spend, and I wanted to use it to introduce another author who might be considered a risk by conventional publishers. Michael Noll was at the top of my list.

I am so in favor of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that Nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that Nature makes frequent use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its Author.

The authors pull no punches on the likelihood of increasing tensions and conflicts in a climatically constrained world and spotlight places where possible conflicts may flare up in the 21st century unless climate change is checked.

Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes – even in a scientific text.