In Letters from a Seducer, Hilst describes the everyday life of Karl, a wealthy, erudite, and amoral man who seeks an answer to his incomprehension of life through sex. Karl writes and sends twenty provocative letters to Cordelia, his chaste sister. The letters' text becomes intertwined with the life of the poet Stamatius, who finds Karl's letters in the trash, as Hilst constructs an ingenious mirror play between the two that casts strange light on questions of amorality, sexuality and the spirit.Linguistically rich and endlessly playful, Letters from a Seducer is a work of perverse genius by one of Brazil's greatest modern writers.

Hilda Hilst (1930-2004) was born in Jaú, a small town in the state of São Paulo. She studied law at the University of São Paulo before dedicating herself to writing from 1954. She published novels, poetry and plays and won many prestigious literary prizes, gaining recognition as one of the most significant and controversial figures in Brazilian literature.