The True Actor by Jacinto Luca Pires and translated by Jaime Braz and Dean Thomas Ellis
The favored prostitute of Lisbon’s rich and powerful has been found dead amid austerity protests in Portugal, and down-on-his-luck actor Americo Abril, who has just won the role of a lifetime playing Paul Giamatti in the avant-garde film Being Paul Giamatti, is the prime suspect.
Abril seeks the real killer, and he grapples with what it means to be Paul Giamatti. Confounded by the role he plays in the film and the roles that he plays in real life—weary dad, blocked artist, henpecked husband, miserable lover, wanted man—Abril struggles to hold together himself, his family, and his country.
The True Actor, the English debut by award-winning Portuguese author Jacinto Lucas Pires, manages both a postmodern boondoggle and a touching story of identity and love and loss in austerity-era Portugal.
Publication Date: November 26, 2013
Paperback: 190 pages
ISBN: 9781938604488
Also available as an eBook
The favored prostitute of Lisbon’s rich and powerful has been found dead amid austerity protests in Portugal, and down-on-his-luck actor Americo Abril, who has just won the role of a lifetime playing Paul Giamatti in the avant-garde film Being Paul Giamatti, is the prime suspect.
Abril seeks the real killer, and he grapples with what it means to be Paul Giamatti. Confounded by the role he plays in the film and the roles that he plays in real life—weary dad, blocked artist, henpecked husband, miserable lover, wanted man—Abril struggles to hold together himself, his family, and his country.
The True Actor, the English debut by award-winning Portuguese author Jacinto Lucas Pires, manages both a postmodern boondoggle and a touching story of identity and love and loss in austerity-era Portugal.
Publication Date: November 26, 2013
Paperback: 190 pages
ISBN: 9781938604488
Also available as an eBook
The favored prostitute of Lisbon’s rich and powerful has been found dead amid austerity protests in Portugal, and down-on-his-luck actor Americo Abril, who has just won the role of a lifetime playing Paul Giamatti in the avant-garde film Being Paul Giamatti, is the prime suspect.
Abril seeks the real killer, and he grapples with what it means to be Paul Giamatti. Confounded by the role he plays in the film and the roles that he plays in real life—weary dad, blocked artist, henpecked husband, miserable lover, wanted man—Abril struggles to hold together himself, his family, and his country.
The True Actor, the English debut by award-winning Portuguese author Jacinto Lucas Pires, manages both a postmodern boondoggle and a touching story of identity and love and loss in austerity-era Portugal.
Publication Date: November 26, 2013
Paperback: 190 pages
ISBN: 9781938604488
Also available as an eBook
PRAISE FOR THE TRUE ACTOR
“The True Actor is a true pleasure–wise and funny with a subtle gravity and a wild hallucinatory streak. It brilliantly examines the state of a nation through one man's state of mind. Jacinto Lucas Pires is a powerful voice in modern fiction, charming, fearless, flourishing at the crossroads of the playful and the dire." –Sam Lipsyte, author of The Fun Parts and The Ask
“Politically conscious, cinematic, and everything else that is characteristic of the literature of Lucas Pires, all absorbed into and shaken out in a game of conscience in which he holds all the cards. And this book is his royal flush.” –TimeOut Lisbon
“Jacinto Lucas Pires’ third novel is a powerful political and social commentary, rooted in the character of a young actor steeped in the reality of his country’s current crisis.” –Espresso
“No other author could deconstruct, with such proficiency, our quotidian reality...” –Miguel Real, Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jacinto Lucas Pires was born in Porto in 1974 and now lives in Lisbon. He is a writer, playwright, director, musician, and soccer aficionado. The True Actor won the 2013 Domingos da Silva Teixeira Distinguished Literature Award for the best book published in Portugal in the past two years. Pires won the prestigious Prémio Europa–David Mourão-Ferreira (Bari University, Italy/Instituto Camões, Portugal) in 2008. He plays with the band Os Quais. Several translations of his short prose recently appeared in an issue of The St. Petersburg Review translated by Jaime Braz and Dean Thomas Ellis.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
Jaime Braz was born in 1958 in Luanda, Angola. He has a degree in Biology and teaches at a high school in the Portuguese town of Covilhâ, where he lives with his wife, son and dog. His paintings have been exhibited in Portugal and abroad and featured in the Russian edition of Esquire magazine. His short fiction has appeared in the St. Petersburg Review.
Dean Thomas Ellis is a writer and translator living in New Orleans. His work has appeared in Bloodroot, Bedtime Stories, St. Petersburg Review, KGB Bar Lit Journal, and in the online series Working Stiff at PBS.org. He hosts the radio programs Tudo Bem and The Dean's List on WWOZ-FM 90.7 in New Orleans and online at wwoz.org.