Nine, novena / Osman Lins ; translated from the Portuguese, with an introduction by Adria Frizzi

The transparent bird -- A point in the circle -- Hahn's pentagon -- The confused -- Retable of Saint Joana Carolina -- Baroque tale, or, Tripartite unity -- Pastoral -- Engagement -- Lost and found.

Nine, Novena is a collection of nine stories, work that represents the turning point in Lins's career. The recurring themes of these stories - entrapment and search for the self, art versus life, and the mythic aspects of existence - are presented against the background of rural and urban life in northeast Brazil. The stylistic devices of the accessible tales (frequent shifts of tense, long sentences full of parenthetical clauses, heavy punctuation and inversions, and use of graphic symbols to suggest shifts in narrative perspective) all contribute to the multiplicity of meaning and significance of these very human stories.