Description: Filled with violent, captivating stories about life in Rio, this is Fonseca's first collection to appear in English.
Review Quotes:
"The Taker is like a blast to the head--here is a dark, sinister Rio de Janeiro, populated by street urchins, stalkers and serial killers. What sort of urban hell have we stumbled into? ... Short, fragmented vignettes that ring with the hard-boiled edge of crime fiction."--Anderson Tepper, Time Out New York
"Rubem Fonseca writes like the maniacal dreamchild of Cortazar and Bukowski. Crazed, ribald, and relentless, the stories in The Taker roam the streets of Rio like their disturbed characters, overwhelmed by the strangeness of life."--Stewart O'Nan
"Fonseca's work confirms, in the final analysis, that as a writer he has gone where none have dared in Brazilian literature."--World Literature Today
"[Fonseca's narratives] take advantage of and reinvent existing popular literary forms, such as the crime novel, but also the political, social, existential and erotic novel."--2003 Juan Rulfo Prize Jury