Long discounted by a literary culture that actively rejected women’s writing, Maria Judite de Carvalho’s biting and bitterly funny work has since exploded across the world. Collecting the entirety of her short works written between 1959 and 1967, when the Salazar dictatorship and the rigid edicts of the Catholic church reigned, the stories in So Many People, Mariana might as well have been written today. These are tough, unflinching accounts of women trapped by a culture that values them as workers or wives but not as people. And if they do escape their circumstances, they are, more often than not, irrevocably punished by the world.
So Many People, Mariana is an introduction to a major international writer at the height of her power. Translated by the renowned Margaret Jull Costa, Carvalho leads readers into the dark of life under patriarchal capitalism, writing “as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy” (New York Review of Books).
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