PinT Book Club 24th session

Welcome to the 24th meeting of PinT Book Club! Join us to discuss Pandora by Brazilian author Ana Paula Pacheco and translated by Julia Sanches, who will join us for the session. The English translation was published in 2025 by Transit Books. This will be a bilingual event (English and Portuguese). See interpretation details below.

To ensure we can pay our collaborators without relying solely on external funding, we are now charging a £6.00 attendance fee per session. You’ll receive a full refund if you cancel up to 24 hours before the session. We hope this fee is affordable for everyone; however, if your circumstances don’t allow you to pay it, please contact us via our website.

Doors will open at 18.50, so we can start promptly at 19.00h. Nearer the time, we'll send you the Zoom link via email.

About the book

Confined to her apartment, a professor falls into an unlikely romance—with a pangolin.

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Ana, a literature professor, plans her remote classes while confined to her apartment during lockdown. Her lover, Alice, has died of Covid. In her place are a series of animals that demand Ana’s care and attention: an overbearing pangolin, a swarm of insects, a giant bat. 

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Amid changes in medication and fraught faculty meetings, Ana’s grip on reality loosens. She begins to devise a syllabus on the financialization of art and life, posing questions about labor and intimacy she will use her own body to answer. Her apartment fills with creatures, her teaching slides into absurd allegory, and her sense of what is real, permissible, or politically legible fractures.

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Equal parts tender and grotesque, Pandora is a hallucinatory portrait of a mind and a world in collapse, a razor-sharp meditation on desire, delusion, and the absurd endurance of the human.

Ana Paula Pacheco is a professor of literary theory and comparative literature at the University of São Paulo, and author of the books Lugar do mito, about the work of João Guimarães Rosa; A casa deles, a collection of short stories; and Ponha-se no seu lugar!, for which she received the Seleção Cátedra Unesco prize.

Julia Sanches is a literary translator working from Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Catalan into English. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, she has spent extended periods of time in the United States, Mexico, Switzerland, Scotland, and Catalonia, giving her an intimate knowledge of the languages, cultures, and literatures she works in. She is a founding member of Cedilla & Co., a collective of translators committed to making international voices heard in English, and chair of the Translators Group of the Authors Guild. Julia holds a BA in English Literature and Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh and an MA in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona. After working as an assistant and agent for several years, representing authors from around the world, she is focusing her energies on translation and advocating for the authors and books she is passionate about.

Praise for PANDORA:

"Ribald and unsettling...the experimental and provocative narration is consistently engrossing."

— Publishers Weekly

“Playful, visceral, intriguing.”

— Foreword Reviews, Starred Review

“In recommending books, I often find myself saying that the ones best capturing the truth of what it’s like to live in the present have a surreality about them. Well, I’m saying it again… Why is it that such a weird book feels so natural? Doesn’t really matter, because it does.”

— James Crossley, Leviathan Bookstore (St. Louis, MO)