Pandora - by Ana Paula Pacheco (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Ana, a literature professor, plans her remote classes while confined to her apartment during lockdown. Her lover, Alice, has died of Covid. In her place are a series of animals that demand Ana's care and attention: an overbearing pangolin, a swarm of insects, a giant bat.

Amid changes in medication and fraught faculty meetings, Ana's grip on reality loosens. She begins to devise a syllabus on the financialization of art and life, posing questions about labor and intimacy she will use her own body to answer. Her apartment fills with creatures, her teaching slides into absurd allegory, and her sense of what is real, permissible, or politically legible fractures.

Equal parts tender and grotesque, Pandora is a hallucinatory portrait of a mind and a world in collapse, a razor-sharp meditation on desire, delusion, and the absurd endurance of the human.

About the Author

Ana Paula Pacheco is a professor of literary theory and comparative literature at the University of São Paulo, and author of the books Lugar do mito, about the work of João Guimarães Rosa; A casa deles, a collection of short stories; and Ponha-se no seu lugar!, for which she received the Seleção Cátedra Unesco prize.

Julia Sanches is a translator of Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Claudia Hernández, Daniel Galera, and Eva Baltasar, among others.