Balladinhas.

Rio de Janeiro, Domingos de Magalhães, 1894.. FIRST EDITION. 8°, recent dark green quarter sheep over marbled boards, spine gilt with raised bands in five compartments, crimson leather lettering piece, gilt letter, decorated endleaves, top edge tinted green, other edges uncut, original printed wrappers bound in. Occasional light foxing and light browning. Wrappers a bit frayed. Overall in good to very good condition. Unidentified contemporary inscription on half-title. 286 pp., (1 l.). *** FIRST EDITION of this collection of short stories. Coelho Netto (1864-1934) was born in Caxias, Maranhão, to a Portuguese father and Indian mother. From his earliest years he was fascinated with native lore as well as the Portuguese and Latin classics; both had profound effects on his writings. He is difficult to classify, and has been called both a realist and a romanticist. Certainly he was one of the most vocal adversaries of the Modernist movement, and the Modernist authors responded by excluding his works from anthologies for many years. In the Academia Brasileira de Letras, however, he was held in such esteem that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933. To Machado de Assis he was "dos nossos primeiros romancistas, e geralmente falando, dos nossos primeiros escritores"; to Silvio Roméro, he was one of the sixteen best Brazilian writers, and "o mais imaginoso de todos" (both quoted in Faria, pp. 126, 128).Coelho Netto left an enormous oeuvre of over 120 volumes, including novels, plays, short stories, folktales, and political and historical essays. His works have been translated into French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Swiss, Russian, Japanese, Danish and Esperanto.*** Menezes, Dicionário literario brasileiro pp. 196-8. Carpeaux, Pequena bibliografia crítica da literatura brasileira pp. 178-80. Faria, ed., Coelho Neto, Romance (Nossos Clássicos 15). Paulo Coelho Netto, Coelho Netto, pp. 189 and throughout. Goldberg, Brazilian Literature pp. 248-60. Bandeira, Brief History of Brazilian Literature pp. 119, 121. Hollis lists only the 1922 edition, as do Melvyl (copies at SRLF and CSL), British Library Integrated Catalogue, and Library of Congress Online Catalog. Orbis lists a 1924 edition. Porbase cites editions of 1922 and 1924.