In this simple tale, the novel's hero is the talented heir to a notable family in Lisbon. He aspires to serve his fellow man in his chosen profession of medicine, in the arts, and in politics. But he enters a society affected by powerful international influences--French intellectual developments, English trading practices--that trouble and frustrate him. In the end he is reduced to a kind of spiritual helplessness and his good intentions are reduced to dilettantism. His passionate love affair begins to suffer a devastating constraint.

Carlos, heir to a great fortune, becomes a doctor and drifts along spending time at the theater, reading, and having affairs, until he falls deeply in love but has to hide a terrible secret.

Sold into slavery to the dealer Lalloc by her mother when her stepfather seduces her, the beautiful 15-year-old Maia is almost raped by Genshed, one of Lalloc's employees but is saved by Occula, a black slave girl. With no-one but Occula at her side, Maia must summon all her courage, strength and intelligence as she navigates the seedy side of the Beklan empire.

A compassionate tale of marriage, manners, and betrayal, from the Portuguese master José Maria Eça de Queirós, the first great modern Portuguese novelist, wrote The Yellow Sofa with (in his own words) “no digressions, no rhetoric,” creating a book where “everything is interesting and dramatic and quickly narrated.” The story, a terse and seamless spoof of Victorian bourgeois morals, concerns a successful businessman who returns home to find his wife “on the yellow damask sofa, leaning in abandon on the shoulder of a man.” The man is none other than his best friend and business partner. While struggling with the need to defend his honor, he fights a stronger inner desire for domestic tranquility and forgiveness. The Yellow Sofa firmly establishes Eça de Queirós in the literary pantheon that includes Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, and Tolstoy.

At the height of Tim Maia's soaring fame, he joined a radical, extraterrestrial-obsessed cult and created two plus albums of some of Brazil's-and the globe's-best funk and soul music. This book explores the career of the man often hailed as the James Brown or Barry White of Brazil, and the time of his radical transformation from a musician notorious for hedonistic living to a devoted follower of Manoel Jacinto Coelho's Rational Culture. After suddenly joining Coelho's cult in 1974 (which started first as an offshoot of the mystical Afro-Brazilian religion Umbanda), Maia gave up drugs and alcohol, threw away his material possessions, and released Racional Vols. 1 & 2 in the attempt to convert the entirety of Brazil and the world to the revelation of Rational Culture. Thayer explores this strange, brief, yet incredibly prolific period of Maia's life wherein the reigning soul and funk artist of Brazil produced two albums, an EP, and a recently unearthed tape containing almost another full album of funky jams laced with spiritual content and scripture. For just as quickly as Maia became entranced with Coelho did he become disillusioned with the cult, disavowing and destroying everything having to do with that experience and refusing to speak of it for the rest of his life. 33 1/3 Global, a series related to but independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of short, music-based books and brings the focus to music throughout the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.

"Short stories (fiction) by the great nineteenth-century Portuguese author Jose Maria Eca de Queiros; a variety of themes characterize the stories: love, greed, obsession, country life; patriotism"--

This novel tells the story of Carlos, heir to a noble family, who is caught in the impotence and decadence of Potuguese society at the end of the 19th century. He finds his noble intentions reduced to amiable dilettantism and his romantic passion to tragic impossibility.