In Bookstores Now
The Absent Moon: A Memoir of a Short Childhood and a Long Depression
A literary sensation in Brazil, Luiz Schwarcz’s brave and tender memoir interrogates his ordeal of bipolar disorder in the context of a family story of murder, dispossession, and silence—the long echo of the Holocaust across generations.
“Marked by a clarity that comes from total, rigorous precision . . . reads like a liberation, not just from the form of the next-generation Holocaust memoir but also from the assumption, so common in autobiographical writing, that memory should create meaning . . . The Absent Moon is, for all its restraint, a profoundly emotional book, and a brave one.”
The New Yorker
“An authentic literary achievement.”
Andrew Solomon
“A beautiful work that is in turn haunting, touching and redemptive.”
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Find Eric's Work with these fine publishers
About Me
I’m Digital Director & Senior Editor of the international literary journal Words Without Borders and a translator from the Portuguese. I’m also a freelance book editor. I edited—together with Mirna Queiroz of Brazilian literary magazine Pessoa—the PEN America anthology Glossolália: Women Writing Brazil, featuring twelve women writers from South America’s largest country. (You can take a peek at Lit Hub and Electric Literature.) My latest translations are Lilia M. Schwarcz’s Brazilian Authoritarianism, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s That Hair (“A compelling … poetics of the self,” says MacArthur “Genius” and National Book Award-winner John Keene), and the Fernanda Torres novel Glory and Its Litany of Horrors (a finalist for a CLMP Firecracker Award; read more in The New Yorker). I was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship for a collection of short stories by Lygia Fagundes Telles. In 2020, my translation of Mia Couto’s Rain and Other Stories received honorable mention from the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work. In 2021, I was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize.
In 2016, I lived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to translate Brazilian literature. I’ve since returned to New York.
To see some of my past work as a translator from the Portuguese, click here.
Eric M. B. Becker
Complete Series
More Books
Explore more of my books, including poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from writers across the Lusophone world, including Mozambique, Brazil, Angola, and Portugal.
Discover my translations of Mia Couto, Fernanda Torres, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, Alice Sant’Anna and more.
“In these pages, you’ll discover writers whose work you’ll want desperately to know better. These pieces do what literature should and must: they open up the world.”
Claire Messud
On Glossolalia
“This book is a marvel. Djaimilia has written a story that is wry and gentle, profound and deeply moving. That Hair asks what it means to exist in the world as we are.”
Maaza Mengiste
Booker Prize Finalist
“Becker’s intricate translation uses wonderful almost-words to recreate Couto’s illusory and playful sentences.”
New York Times
On Rain
“The translators’ linguistic dance… pays homage to Couto’s original … and gives birth to its indelible existence in English.”
Asymptote
On Sea Loves Me
Now in English: The Latest from Acclaimed Brazilian Historian Lilia M. Schwarcz
My translation of Lilia M. Schwarcz’s Brazilian Authoritarianism: Past and Present (Princeton University Press), is available now. This is a searing look into Brazil’s societal ills, from the colonial period up to the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, from the country’s leading public intellectual.
