Whether you’re listening or not, my friends, whether a beautiful sentence moves you or leaves you cold, Brazilian literature has lost a piece of its soul today. Beatriz Yagoda may have gambled too much and hid from her own children, but she wrote like the room was on fire, and so it went down. At nine this morning she burned to death in a hotel on Boipeba. The flames, my friends, were started by a cigar left burning in her room. Smokers, take heed.
