The taker and other stories / Rubem Fonseca ; [edited by] translated from the Portuguese by Clifford Landers

Translated from the Portuguese.

Night drive -- Taker -- Betsy -- Enemy -- Account of the incident -- Pride -- Notebook -- Eleventh of May -- Book of panegyrics -- Trials of a young writer -- Other -- Happy New Year -- Dwarf -- Flesh and the bones.

Most widely admired for his short fiction, The Taker and Other Stories is Fonseca's first collection to appear in English translation, and it ranges across his oeuvre, exploring the sights and sounds of the modern landscape of Rio de Janeiro. Rubem Fonseca's Rio is a city at war, a city whose vast disparities-in wealth, social standing, and prestige-are untenable. In the stories of The Taker, rich and poor live in an uneasy equilibrium, where only overwhelming force can maintain order, and violence and deception are essential tools of survival.Whether recounting the story of a businessman who runs over pedestrians to let off steam, a serial killer being pushed to ever greater crimes by his bourgeois lover, the desperate poor rushing to butcher a cow that has been killed in a traffic accident, or a man seeking out confirmation for a past which his friends deny, Fonseca repeatedly reaffirms his status as one of the purest storytellers on the contemporary Brazilian literary scene.