Diorama - by Carol Bensimon (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

After years spent outrunning her past, Cecília reexamines the case of a close family friend killed by a colleague and rival: her father.

Cecília migrates from southern Brazil to Northern California, assuming a new life as a taxidermist. Her temperament is ideally suited for the work of restoring once-living things and constructing dioramas of enclosed immobilized worlds. But when it comes to reconstructing her own history, Cecília's knack for composition frays.

When news comes that her father's heart is failing and she may need to return home to see him before it's too late, Cecília's past won't stay fixed like a specimen behind glass any longer. Her story emerges, it stalks her, hunts her, and becomes her natural predator.

In 1988, as Brazil's dictatorship fell and democratic rule returned, a beloved local congressman in Porto Alegre was assassinated. The prime suspect: Cecília's father. Now, she threads the past and present, and reveals the secrets, lies, and taboo affairs that ignited the media frenzy and investigation of the murder.

In sleek, arresting prose that has the suspense-filled edge of a true-crime thriller, Carol Bensimon's newest novel cements her status as one of the most dynamic voices in contemporary Brazilian literature. Diorama is her fourth book, the first since she won the Jabuti Award, Brazil's most prestigious honor for fiction, in 2018. Here, her narrative gifts are at their apex, fusing crime procedural, queer coming-of-age, and political drama. Bensimon constructs a moving model of memory, endangering our notions of what is or isn't still alive inside all of us.

About the Author

Carol Bensimon was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1982. She is the author of the highly acclaimed novel O Clube dos Jardineiros de Fumaça, which won the Jabuti Award, the most prestigious literary award in Brazil, and was short-listed for the São Paulo Prize for Literature. She is the author of the novels We All Loved Cowboys and Sinuca embaixo d'água and of the acclaimed story collection Pó de parede. In 2012 she was selected by Granta as one of the Best Young Brazilian Novelists. Bensimon has a master's degree in creative writing from PUCRS and lives with her girlfriend in Mendocino, California.

Zoë Perry's translations of contemporary Brazilian fiction have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Granta, n+1, The New York Times, Astra, The White Review, and elsewhere. Her translation of "My Good Friend" by Juliana Leite, published in The Paris Review, was awarded a National Magazine Award for Fiction and was selected by Amor Towles for a 2024 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction. Perry's translation of Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia won the 2024 Republic of Consciousness prize and the inaugural Cercador Prize, and was short-listed for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Julia Sanches translates works from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Her translations include Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández, for which she won a PEN/Heim Award, as well as works by Noemi Jaffe, Daniel Galera, and Geovani Martins. She is a founding mem