All Dogs Are Blue - by Rodrigo de Souza Leão (Paperback)

About the Book

An original and comic voice from contemporary Brazil - Souza Leão orchestrates a carnival among the mad.

Book Synopsis

"Rodrigo de Souza Leão is an exceptional author and has had a major impact on contemporary Brazilian literature."--Paulo Scott

All Dogs are Blue is a scurrilously funny tale of life in a Rio insane asylum. Its raw style and comic inventiveness signal a major voice in Brazilian literature. Sadly the author died, aged forty-three, soon after it was published in 2008.

Due to his mental fragility, Rodrigo de Souza Leão rarely left his house and yet, through social media, blogging, and e-mail, he became close to many Brazilian writers and poets and remains highly regarded today.

Review Quotes

"Life is lived intensely and with gusto at the asylum in Rio. All Dogs are Blue kept me curious and it kept me laughing ... Souza Leão is a mind-blowing poet; his attitude seems to be something like: Why not flaunt the language(s) that madness has taught me?" Deborah Levy

"A firecracker of a book." The Independent on Sunday

"When I finished reading the book I was so completely taken by it that I could only think about translating it into Spanish and finding a publisher for it. That's what I did." Juan Pablo Villalobos

"Souza Leão's autobiographical novel...weaves the lives of the poor with the insane, and poetry with psychosis." The Independent

"[Rodrigo de Souza Leão's] writing fizzes with vertiginous energy." Nick Caistor, The TLS

"Souza Leão uses a kind of language his schizophrenia has taught him, creating a poetry that's at one moment absurd and the next heartbreakingly self-aware. It's an innovative, original book." Justin Alvarez, The Paris Review

"Rodrigo de Souza Leão is an exceptional author and has had a major impact on contemporary Brazilian literature." Paulo Scott, Machado de Assis Prize winning writer

"Full of heart and soul, All Dogs Are Blue is one of the most powerful reading experiences I've had. A masterpiece." Cristhiano Aguiar, one of Granta's Best of Young Brazilian Novelists

"All Dogs are Blue is a novel as moving as it is full of humour and irony." Antônio Moura, Brazilian poet

"All Dogs Are Blue is sometimes ugly, often beautiful and always alive - and it is unforgettable." The Literateur

"A candid, frenetically paced portrayal of mental illness that lurches between the darkest realms of consciousness and the most elevated and poetic." Culture Critic

"At once surreal and poignant this is one of the strangest and most haunting pieces I read this year." Julia Bell, Books of the Year, Writer's Hub

"This is a stunning story full of heartbreaking sadness and dark comedy in equal measures." We Love This Book

"Like no other book in the world...All Dogs Are Blue is no book for literary purists, but is a great read for anyone who can embrace the human spirit." Douglas Messerli, Rain Taxi

"His writing is genuinely thrilling at times, pushing realism to the modernist limits of hallucination with unexpected turns-of-phrase and darkly drawn images undercut by punchlines that seem to materialise out of nowhere." Totally Dublin

"Souza Leão's autobiographical account of schizophrenia is written with tremendous verve and perspicuity, crisply translated by Zoe Perry and Stefan Tobler. All Dogs are Blue is a profound examination of the tricks and quirks of a fragile mind and Souza Leão demonstrates with startling humour how easy it is to tip from sanity into delusion." Lucy Popescu, Huffington Post

"The novel's pained, honest prose left me reeling for much of its length ... the headlong rush of prose and ideas becomes breathtaking ... for all of the things that we don't know about this brief, crushingly moving book's narrator, we do know that he was once a child; we can experience something of that innocence, and the heart at his core. It's an indication of why we should care about this man, and what warm decency lies at the beginnings of this particular narrative." Tobias Carroll, Volume 1: Brooklyn

"All Dogs Are Blue is a captivating and brilliant stream of consciousness novella about mental illness in a Brazilian asylum. Souza Leão's semi-autobiographical story is fantastic ... I would go as far as to say that this book is the Brazilian equivalent of The Bell Jar. I wouldn't say this lightly as The Bell Jar is one of my favourite books." Jessica Patient, A View from Here

About the Author

Rodrigo Antonio de Souza Leao Rodrigo de Souza Leao was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1965 and died there in 2008, in a psychiatric clinic, shortly after publishing his extraordinary autobiographical novel All Dogs are Blue. Due to his mental fragility, Souza Leao rarely left his house and yet, through social media, blogging and email, he became close to many Brazilian writers and poets, and remains highly regarded today. His death was marked by a flood of poems in homage.
Souza Leao was a prolific writer, publishing many poetry collections in his lifetime and co-founding Zunai, one of Brazil's most important poetry magazines. Since his death, further works of fiction have been published to widespread acclaim and his 'outsider' art received a dedicated exhibition at Rio's Museum of Modern Art. All Dogs are Blue has been adapted for the stage and will be published in Spanish in Juan Pablo Villalobos's translation.
Publisher Stefan Tobler Stefan Tobler founded And Other Stories in 2010 out of frustration at the great books not being published in English. Born in the Amazon to English and Swiss parents, he translates from Portuguese and German. Recent translations include Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector and the poetry collection Silence River by Antonio Moura.
Translator Zoe Perry Zoe Perry was born in the Southern United States in 1981 to an American father and Canadian mother. A full-time translator since 2010, she also works from French. After spending the last eight years living everywhere from Moscow to Montreal, including four years in Sao Paulo, Brazil, she now calls Madrid home.