You are cordially invited, if in São Paulo, Brazil, to attend a book reading of To Belém & Back this Sunday, January 20th. This will be the first book reading in Brazil after the book’s launch and since it won a coveted * Star review from the industry leader Publishers […]
Upon leaving Dona Romana and her home of cataclysmic faith in central Tocantins, the final push to Brazil’s northernmost parts entered a most precarious phase. There was only one road north now, the infamously decrepit and dangerous Belém-Brasília, “about which the Quatro Rodas listing for Paraiso de Tocantins warns ‘avoid […]
“As we approached Natividade, Tocantins’ oldest and most enigmatic town dating back to 1734, a strange translucent whiteness hovered overhead as if a wide, diffuse light was gathering above. […] Although Natividade is the only historically preserved colonial backwater in the state, it is so unassuming, so far off the […]
Bananal Island is the largest fluvial island in the world, with a violent history. Only several years before our visit, the local Javaés Indians had ransacked and taken over the park occupying the northern third of the island (on the Araguaia River, a massive Amazon tributary) they did not already […]
“Due, maybe, to the fatalistic roads or to the shimmering quality of light in the high, semi-dry savanna of Central Brazil, we were quickly entering a mystic nation within a nation. The first premonitions were in Pirenópolis, another historic gold-boom town like Goiás Velho, only more spiritual.” – To Belém […]
“When we departed Minas Gerais for Goiás that day, we left the more developed Southeast for the wild Central West which used to be called Mato Grosso, or Dense Forest. Dense forest it is no longer, but then a good part of Goiás was always a relatively treeless grassland called […]
“If the state’s major tourist attraction was just a little too tacky, the economy of robust pink alligators too up and coming, the state of Goiás itself was fast growing on me. I felt as though I had found an older and simpler Brazil, untouched and undisturbed by oceans and […]
Minas Gerais is famous for its rolly-polly tropical highland hills and extensive number of backroads, many in dirt. The state is the size of France or Texas, after all, and a country unto itself: with different landscapes, accents, customs, and cuisine. In Minas “what developed was a distinctly Brazilian (as […]
You’re cordially invited to the first post-Rio Olympics reading of To Belém & Back, recently given one of Publishers Weekly’s coveted ★ Star reviews. Author Ben Batchelder intends to give a brief reading, present the short film “Tiradentes2Belém,” and answer any questions at the Signet Society, in Cambridge, Mass., on […]
The first public reading of To Belém & Back in Miami Beach, one of the cradles of the book’s creation, was a hoot, with 23+ people packing into my old friend Russell’s mid-beach apartment. Novelist Ben Batchelder read a darker passage than usual, about the change in his relation with […]
