With My Dog-eyes: A Novel

(Paperback)

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Description

Something has changed in Amos Keres, a university mathematics professor - his sentences trail off in class, he is disgusted by the sight of his wife and son, and he longs to flee the comfortable bourgeois life he finds himself a part of. Written in a fragmented style that echoes the character's increasingly fragile hold on reality, With My Dog-Eyes is an intensely vivid read. Hilst, whose father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, has created a lacerating, and yet oddly hopeful, portrayal of a descent into hell.

Reviews

Told through poetic and disjointed prose, With My Dog-Eyes is a dark and truly singular work.
NPR, Best Books of 2014

Hilsts writing is characterized by an exuberant, masterful impropriety and winding sentences that put it, by her own lights, squarely in the tradition of literature that includes Joyce and Beckett.
Boston Globe

A pleasure to see and read.
NPR

A slim but potent text, this one will sear your brain."
Jeff Vandermeer picks the Best Fiction of 2014,Electric Literature

Hilst rigorously examined the limits of language and the literary pursuit itself [She] uses language like a rod, ramming it every which way in order to collapse the space between orgasm and insanity.
Bookslut

Best Fiction Books of 2014
Entropy Magazine

Clear and unforgettable It is certain that Hilsts short book by the end grows as large as the dilating heart."
Rain Taxi

Hilsts fictions are feats of economy and compression: though they are shortthe texts do not feel small One of the great achievements of Hilsts fiction is indeed the splendor that wrenches the reader, too, from sameness, the way it challenges and provokes, with a seriousness and irreverence, a comedy and bleakness all its own.
Music and Literature

A provocative and engaging personal portrait Worth your time.
Complete Review

Rich, deep, unique, and avant-garde With My Dog-Eyes is a great introduction to the work of a writer who occupies an important place not only Latin American letters but in world literature as well.
Atticus Review

Captivatingly translated...a densely allusive novella by the late Brazilian writer Hilda Hist, traces the coming undone of a mathematics professor, and is too brilliantly bizarre to quote at length."
Times Literary Supplement (UK), Books of the Year

Hilst wastes no time in plunging into the most intense, mysterious stuff of lifedazzling moments.
The Independent (UK)

Conveys the ferocious energy of this modern master of disturbance [A] joyfully wicked writer Morriss translation deserves the highest praise; the constant shifts in perspective call for tremendous agility.
Times Literary Supplement(UK)

Hilsts lyrical little book ebbs and flows with vivid imagery Readers will enjoy this taste of Hilsts talent.
Publishers Weekly

This novel speaks to the nexus between genius and madnessand it gets off a few growls at the state of things as they are. Memorable and very strange: Latin American magical realism taken far beyond the bounds of the genres usual whimsy.
Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Hilda Hilst and The Obscene Madame D

Like her friend and admirer Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst was a passionate explorer of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the obscene.
Benjamin Moser

This brief, lyrical and scalding account of a mind unhinged recalls the passionate urgency of Artaud and de Sades waking dreams in which sex and death are forever conjoined and loves vivid time irretrievably lost.
Rikki Ducornet

May just be the literary miracle of 2012 ... The Obscene Madame D stands at only 57 pages and yet manages to offer the reader a truly immersive experience unlike any of the classic tomes that brim with words.
Alex Estes, Full-Stop

In the sense that language is a cultural and political construct, Hilst breaks that construct and, in doing so, asks us to hear lifes eventual silence.
Sarah Gerard, Los Angeles Review of Books

Author Bio

HILDA HILST was born in 1930 in Jao, Brazil. Hilst was a prolific author whose work spans many different genres, including poetry, fiction, drama and newspaper columns. Born the heiress to a coffee fortune, she abandoned Sao Paolo and promising law career in the 1960s, moved to the countryside, and built herself a house, Casa do Sol, where she lived until the end of her life with a rotating cast of friends, lovers, aspiring artists, bohemian poets, and dozens of dogs. She received many major literary prizes over the course of her career, including Brazil's highest honor, the Premio Jabuti. Her work has been translated into French, German, and Italian. She died in 2004, at the age of 73. ADAM MORRIS is a PhD candidate in Latin American literature at Stanford University. An excerpt from his translation of With My Dog-Eyes won the 2012 Susan Sontag Foundation Prize for Literary Translation.