Author(s): Emilio Fraia

Novel | Translated fiction | Lolli Editions

Three subtly connected stories converge in this chimerical debut, each burrowing into a turning point in a person's life: a young woman gives a melancholy account of her obsession with climbing Mount Everest; a Peruvian-Brazilian vanishes into the forest after staying in a musty, semi-abandoned inn in the haunted depths of the Brazilian countryside; a young playwright embarks on the production of a play about the city of Sevastopol and a Russian painter portraying Crimean War soldiers.

Inspired by Tolstoy's The Sevastopol Sketches, Emilio Fraia masterfully weaves together these stories of yearning and loss, obsession and madness, failure and the desire to persist, in a restrained manner reminiscent of Anton Chekhov, Roberto Bolano, and Rachel Cusk.

“A truly beautiful book that is hard to describe without using words like precision, subtlety and, mostly, wisdom.”

– Alejandro Zambra

“Like the writers I most admire, Fraia sets for himself the hardest and most respectable task a writer can face: unravelling the mystery without revealing the secret.”

– Javier Montes

“Fraia captures a very specific sense of what it is like to live in São Paulo in the current political climate, but he also captures something much more universal: what it is like to live in a culture from which you feel entirely disconnected and, within that culture, to try to make art of any kind. I think that theme can speak to readers in any country.”

– Deborah Treisman

”Graceful and melancholic, enhanced by Zoë Perry’s subtle translation... Impeccably realised, and this is another groundbreaking publication from newish Lolli Editions.”

– Catherine Taylor, The Irish Times, The Best New Literature in Translation

“Somber, spare stories that let the reader crawl inside, searching for insight, only to be left greedily craving more.”

– Kirkus Reviews

“If Graciliano Ramos describes the old, romantic Brazil of a century ago, Emilio Fraia describes something much more like the country that exists today—the country and people I know... The translation is excellent, by the way.”

– Benjamin Moser

“Brilliant… Smuggled in under the cover of these stories of, as one character puts it, ‘lunatics and lost people’, is a portrait of Brazil in precipitous decline, riven by racism, inequality and violence. Fraia provides the reader with only a few outright glimpses of this covert narrative, preferring instead to dress it within the specific context of each story.”

– Marshall Shord, Southwest Review

“The three pieces in Sevastopol are nicely presented, well-written and atmospheric. Fraia manage to keep the common theme of story-telling as under-current, not drowning his stories in it (even as it is omnipresent), and the interweaving back-and-forth in each of the tales is very effective. It makes for a solid little volume – fine reading."

– M.A. Orthofer, The Complete Review

“Pointillist… The fragmentary character of this allusive, mercurial book is such that, when you finish it, you have an assortment of eye-catching puzzle pieces but no clear sense of how they’re meant to go together “

– The Wall Street Journal

“Emilio Fraia taps Tolstoy for inspiration in this slim but moving collection of interconnected stories.”

– The Philadelphia Inquirer

“A remarkable debut: three highly atmospheric and super-saturated stories feature characters yearning, striving and coming apart at the seams. There is at once a weight and a phosphorescent brightness, too (like Dickens’s description of Marley’s ghost shining in the dark like a rotten lobster). Emilio Fraia, a master of the subjects of love and loss, has a knack for levering things into the reader sideways, and shockingly fast: it’s like getting a splinter, but much, much more enjoyable.”

– Barbara Epler, TANK Magazine

“Three stories track the wanderings of contemporary Brazilians in Fraia’s subtle and melancholy English-language debut, a collection inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches.”

– Publishers Weekly

“Fraia is interested not in the reality of things but its representation. That, after all, is what writing is about.”

– John Self, The Critic

“These tales don’t operate the way most tales do; they adhere to their own separate sense of languid time.”

– Tope Folarin, Vulture, Best Books to Read This Summer

“Fraia redefines the trauma of a physical battle through the lens of his characters’ struggles with nature, culture and the self. The over-layered voices throughout the book create vast worlds that feel nearly mythic, and all too real. Fraia’s aptness for storytelling in Sevastopol lies within the entrancing matter of human suffering.”

– Joshua Bohnsack, New City Lit

“All three stories transmit human emotion in innately relatable fashion. Adventure and excitement combine with sadness, failure, and loss, all of this tinged with hope and a desire to carry on, woven through each narrative. Well written, Emilio Fraia’s clever prose ignites the imagination and keeps the reader engaged till the end.”

– BuzzMag

”Absorbing… Whether through art, travel, physical exertion or literal disappearance, each of the characters we encounter is yearning to escape. Many-layered and exquisitely crafted, the disarming simplicity with which these stories are written belies their haunting complexity.”

– The Monthly Booking

“A sharply observed trio of intricately connected stories. Sparse prose and hauntingly atmospheric.”

– Eleanor Updegraff

”Absorbing… Whether through art, travel, physical exertion or literal disappearance, each of the characters we encounter is yearning to escape. Many-layered and exquisitely crafted, the disarming simplicity with which these stories are written belies their haunting complexity.”

– The Monthly Booking

“Meditative, mournful, and dreamlike… Fraia takes more than inspiration from the Sketches: his three narratives echo back and forth, in conversation with its themes, but also insistent in the question of whether one can ever tell where one story ends and another begins.”

– Jess Moody, Lunate

“Sevastopol is a gentle marvel, each story offering a window, a reflection, a pool of shimmery blue – never darkness, no finales, no dead-ends. Their dilemma – how to make art amongst the ruins – seems universal and extraordinarily pertinent.”

– The Common Breath

“Accurate language, powerful imagination.”

– Sérgio Sant’Anna

“A literary jewel.”

– Fernanda Torres

EMILIO FRAIA was born in São Paulo in 1982. Sevastopol, his third book, was one of the winners of the Biblioteca Nacional Prize and a finalist for the Oceanos Prize and Jabuti Prize. One of Granta’s Best Young Brazilian Writers, Fraia has been awarded a Civitella Ranieri Writing Fellowship and is currently an editor at Companhia das Letras.

ZOË PERRY’s translations of contemporary Portuguese-language writers have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Words Without Borders. She is a founding member of the London-based translators’ collective the Starling Bureau.