Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0802116949, Hardcover)

Building on the wonderful Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, acclaimed by Booklist as "a beautiful one-volume course in the soul of the twentieth century," preeminent translator Richard Zenith now delivers a superbly edited and translated selection from the prose work of a truly unique figure of early modernism. Though known primarily as a poet, Fernando Pessoa wrote prose widely, in several languages and in every genre -- fiction, drama, letters, and essays. Drawing from the huge body of work that Pessoa left behind, Richard Zenith has produced a volume that is full of delights. Pessoa and his many literary alter egos, or "heteronyms," experiment with the Surrealists' automatic writing and invent the movement "Sensationism" (whose adherents were all heteronyms). There are appreciations of Shakespeare, Dickens, Wilde, and Joyce, critical essays in which one heteronym derides the work of another, and a love letter by Pessoa's only known female heteronym. There is a selection from Pessoa's best-known work, The Book of Disquiet, retranslated from newly discovered materials. Like Fernando Pessoa & Co., Selected Prose is an important monument to one of the greatest exponents of modernism, a forgotten but crucial part of the literary canon.