10 am

Event 1
Writing the past

Moacyr Scliar
Ricardo Benzaquen
Edson Nery da Fonseca

mediator
Ángel Gurría-Quintana

Gilberto Freyre once declared: “Writing is my medium. It may be vanity, but I consider myself a literary writer, with a literary style.” Most critics agree that Freyre is unrivalled among Brazilian social scientists when it comes to the quality of the writing. Together at Paraty to discuss this aspect of his work will be novelist Moacyr Scliar, literary critic Edson Nery and historian Ricardo Benzaquen.

12 pm

Event 2
Crime and punishment

Patricia Melo
Lionel Shriver

mediator
Arnaldo Bloch

Lionel Shriver achieved worldwide success with her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, about a family trying to understand the motivations behind a son’s murderous spree. At Paraty she will be sharing the stage with Patricia Melo, one of Brazil’s acknowledged mistresses of psychological suspense.

3 pm

Event 3
Contemporary fables

Reinaldo Moraes
Ronaldo Correia de Brito
Beatriz Bracher

mediator
Cristiane Costa

Reinaldo Moraes writes about São Paulo’s underground world of unruly characters abusing drugs and alcohol. Ronaldo Correia de Brito creates a mythical backland with echoes of biblical parables. Beatriz Bracher plays with language to write intimate stories. What unites such disparate narrative voices in Paraty is the fact that they are considered among the most original talents in contemporary Brazilian literature.

5:15 pm

Event 4
Open veins

Isabel Allende

mediator
Humberto Werneck

Isabel Allende is an astonishing literary success. Since publishing The House of the Spirits, in 1982, she has sold over 56 million books in 30 languages. Alongside Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, she is one of the leading lights of Latin American letters and of the “magical realism” that was so influential in the region. She will talk about her unique writing career with journalist and Flip veteran Humberto Werneck.

7:30 pm

Event 5
The book: chapter 1

Peter Burke
Robert Darnton

mediator
Lilia Schwarcz

“The second book printed on the Gutemberg press was about the death of the publishing industry,” says a joke currently doing the rounds in literary circles. The first of two events about the future of the book brings together two of the world’s most highly regarded cultural historians. Both have specialised in the history of reading and the media, and will discuss how anxieties about new technologies such as Ipads and Kindles can be traced back to the dawn of the early modern period.