Love of Singular Men

Victor Heringer was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1988. His first poetry collection, automatografo, was published by 7Letras in 2011, followed by his debut novel, Gloria, which was awarded the 2013 Jabuti Prize. His second novel, O amor dos homens avulsos (The Love of Singular Men), was published by Companhia das Letras in 2016, and was shortlisted for the Sao Paulo Prize for Literature, the Rio Prize for Literature and the Oceanos Prize. In his lifetime, he also published O escritor Victor Heringer (2015), a conceptual book of photographs, contributed a weekly column to the literary magazine Pessoa and translated from English to Portuguese. In 2017 he was selected by Forbes Brasil for inclusion in their 'Forbes under 30' list. Victor Heringer died in 2018, three weeks before his thirtieth birthday. Following his death, Companhia das Letras reissued all of his works and published a collection of his non-fiction writing, Vida desinteressante, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Jabuti Prize. The Love of Singular Men is his first novel to be translated into English.

'When you read something genuinely new it's hard to describe it - you end up settling for comparisons - and The Love of Singular Men is truly a singular novel. It's ingenious like Cortazar or Nabokov, elliptical like Grace Paley, funny like Donald Barthelme. Upon finishing it you want to immediately meet the young man who wrote it, shake him vigorously by the hand and congratulate him on the beginning of a brilliant career. But Victor Heringer is gone. He left this beautiful book behind.' - Zadie Smith ; 'Victor Heringer scrambles genres - tragic romance, pulpy noir, family drama - to plumb the false solace that narrative promises... its style, in James Young's deft translation, is itself bracing, depraved, and, in the way only something truly melancholic can be, very funny.' - Charlie Lee, The New York Review of Books ; 'The brief, precise scenes - incorporating photos, lists and handwritten passages - enable Heringer to cover a great deal in a short space and make a potentially gloomy story into a multilayered celebration of life. That the author died in 2018, aged 29, is a loss to international literature.' - John Self, The Guardian; 'Inventive, surprising and unsparing, The Love of Singular Men is just so unusually vivid. It's an unforgettable book, as sad as it is beautiful, as full of love as it is tragic.' - Wendy Erskine, author of Dance Move and Sweet Home ; 'A formally playful, inventive and moving meditation on complicity and regret ... the exuberance of Heringer's prose is relayed beautifully in James Young's thoughtful translation.'- Andrew van der Vlies, The Times Literary Supplement ; 'Brazilian writer Victor Heringer died in 2018 aged 29, but we should be glad to have The Love of Singular Men to remember him by [...] The writing aches beautifully while still leaving space for profound healing and humanity. - Ronan Hession, The Irish Times ; 'An electrifying, passionate piece of writing - unlike anything I've read. What a loss. What a book.' - Toby Litt, author of A Writer's Diary and Patience ; 'One of the best novels of recent years.' - Asymptote; 'Heringer had little time to live, but he marked an entire generation of writers and readers.' - O Globo ; '[Camilo] endures the terrible events that play out over the course of the novel with an echoingly sad fortitude, writing beguilingly of the love he lost and then reclaimed. Heringer's novel is here to stay' – Paul Bailey, Literary Review