Mastery stories
Original Brazilian Portuguese stories written for this level, with comprehension questions.
Short stories
40 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
O livro paralelo
When an old registrar in Diamantina finally retires, his young successor finds a secret ledger that records everything the law refuses to register.
Nota do tradutor
Translating a famous American novel in Porto Alegre, Marina recognizes a sentence she has read before, in a forgotten book from Pelotas.
Uma tarde de pobreza autêntica
At a charity auction in São Paulo's richest neighborhood, a banker pays a fortune for an unusual experience, guided by the hostess's chauffeur.
A chuva das três
Everyone in Belém knows it rains at three in the afternoon; only one widow in the Cidade Velha knows why, until the day the rain does not come.
Ao pé da letra
After a fall at the office, an accountant in Recife stops understanding figurative language, with surprising effects on his company and his marriage.
Depoimento do síndico
A building manager in Copacabana comes to the police station to report that the young cellist in apartment 802 has vanished, and insists he is a very discreet man.
Personagem secundária
A waitress with two lines in a novel set in Curitiba tells us what life is like on the edges of someone else's story.
O último manuscrito
After a famous novelist dies in Salvador, his editor of thirty-seven years finds his final novel, and it is about her.
Cartas à Prefeitura
A retired man in Goiânia writes to City Hall about a pothole in his street, and the pothole keeps growing between the replies.
O discurso
A senator's speechwriter in Brasília hides a message inside the most important speech of his boss's career.
O processo das rosas
A retired judge in Porto Alegre keeps a diary to prove that his neighbor is poisoning his late wife's roses.
Destinatário errado
An analyst in Florianópolis starts receiving weekly e-mails from a stranger meant for another woman with her name.
A mulher que desbotava
A planning coordinator at a bank on the Faria Lima starts turning transparent in exact proportion to how much she is ignored.
Meio segundo
During tense trade talks at the Itamaraty, a minister forgets his microphone is on, and his interpreter has half a second to decide what he said.
Errata
An old proofreader at a Belo Horizonte newspaper begins using the corrections column to say something he has never said out loud.
Ata da assembleia extraordinária
The official minutes of a residents' meeting in a luxury condominium in Barra da Tijuca, where the agenda is security, smells and the neighboring favela.
O alfaiate de sombras
Behind a narrow door in Salvador's Baixa dos Sapateiros, an old tailor mends not clothes but people's shadows.
Biografia não autorizada
Extracts from a rigorous, independent biography of Ezequiel Moura Tavares, a civil servant from Natal, by a biographer who knows him remarkably well.
O rei do trocadilho
At a bar in Santa Teresa, an eighty-one-year-old champion of puns faces a young internet comedian with four thousand jokes in a notebook.
Obrigada
In his last week before retiring, an old registrar in Recife meets the woman whose unusual first name he allowed forty years earlier.
A letra do escrivão
In Salvador in 1691, an old notary recalls the will he took down at a dying sugar planter's bedside, while an enslaved woman watched his pen.
Cartas à mana Amélia
In 1868, a young woman newly arrived at the imperial Court in Rio writes to her sister about balls, a pompous suitor and a newspaper column everyone is quoting.
O caminho que não existe
In the hills of Minas Gerais in the 1750s, the woman who lays a quilombo's false trails finds a wounded slave-catcher at the bottom of one of her pits.
Caixa alta
On May 13, 1888, a Black typesetter in Rio composes the headline that ends slavery, letter by backwards letter, then carries the page to the coffee farm where his mother still works.
O guarda-livros de Manaus
In 1910, at the height of the rubber boom, a bookkeeper in Manaus receives a dictated letter from a rubber tapper on the Purus who wants to know how much he still owes.
A viradora de páginas
In February 1922, a nineteen-year-old music student turns the pages for a pianist at São Paulo's Modern Art Week while the audience howls.
O vaqueiro que vendeu a sombra
Told in the rhyming manner of a cordel poet, the tale of a cowboy from the Cariri who sells his shadow to the Devil in a drought and then has to buy it back.
Receita de bolo
In São Paulo in 1973, a newspaper's food writer finds her recipes printed in the gaps left by the censors, and readers write in to say the cakes don't work.
O calendário de 1970
In 1979, after the amnesty, a woman waits at Rio's Galeão airport for the brother who went into exile nine years earlier and now returns with a family she has never met.
O telefone de São Cristóvão
In 1877, the messenger who has run errands for the imperial palace in Rio for thirty years is put on the other end of the Emperor's new telephone.
O alfaiate de Vila Rica
In Vila Rica in 1789, a tailor who takes the measurements of the town's conspirators is called to testify about what he heard in his shop.
A reza de Mãe Dondinha
In the backlands of Sergipe in the 1930s, a band of cangaceiros rides into a village and orders the old prayer woman to make one of them bulletproof.
Retrato de viúvo
In Rio in 1866, a photographer's assistant helps take a portrait of a baron beside his dead wife, a man the whole city says married her only for her money.
O remador da Cabanagem
In Belém in 1835, as rebels take the city, a judge disguised as a woman escapes up the rivers in the canoe of a silent Indigenous boatman.
Previsão do tempo
On the night of December 13, 1968, as military censors take over a Rio newsroom, the paper's pedantic weatherman is asked to write a forecast he knows is scientifically wrong.
O vacinador
In Rio in November 1904, a young vaccinator enters a crowded tenement in Saúde just as the city rises against compulsory vaccination.
A letra torta
In Salvador in 1798, a writing master's young apprentice learns why, when seditious papers appear on church doors, a beautiful handwriting can be a death sentence.
Relatório sobre o baile
In Rio in 1976, a police informer is sent to spy on the soul dances of the Black Rio movement, and his reports slowly change.
O forno de Dona Brites
In Recife in 1654, as the Dutch surrender and the Jewish community prepares to leave, a girl goes to the Catholic baker who has secretly baked their Passover bread for twenty years.
O gateado
By the fire in a ranch shed in Rio Grande do Sul, an old gaúcho tells his grandson about the horse that refused to cross a river during the civil war of 1893.