The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa

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"Though known primarily as a poet, Fernando Pessoa wrote prose widely, in several languages and in every genre - the novel, short stories, letters, and essays. Drawing from the huge body of work that Pessoa left behind, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa is further testimony from a writer whose worst enemy was his own brilliance. These pieces span playful intellectual inquiry, Platonic dialogue, and bitter intellectual scrapping between Pessoa and his many literary alter egos ("heteronyms"). Pessoa experiments with the surrealist technique of automatic writing and toys with the occult. The heteronyms launch movements and write manifestos, and one of them attempts to break up Pessoa's only known romantic relationship. 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. Also included is a generous selection from Pessoa's masterpiece The Book of Disquiet, freshly translated by Richard Zenith from newly discovered materials."--BOOK JACKET.