Graded readers

Stories

Original fiction and nonfiction set in Brazil. Read in Portuguese, reveal the gloss sentence by sentence only when you need it, then prove you understood.

fiction

Pão na Chapa

Bread on the Griddle

A São Paulo baker opens her shop before dawn and finds, in the morning rush, the quiet reason she refuses to quit.

fiction

A Feira de Domingo

The Sunday Market

Money is tight, but a man in Belo Horizonte has a clever strategy at the street market — and one small weekly luxury.

nonfiction

O Açaí de Belém

The Açaí of Belém

In Belém, açaí is not a sweet smoothie bowl — it is serious daily food, hard work, and now a global business.

fiction

A Mudança

The Move

A young woman leaves the interior of Ceará for São Paulo and discovers, twenty years later, that saudade can point in two directions.

fiction

O Jogo na Casa do Tio

The Match at Uncle's House

On the day of a Brazil World Cup match, a family gathers around a barbecue, an anxious grandmother, and one very lucky shirt.

nonfiction

A História da Feijoada

The History of Feijoada

Everyone knows the story of how feijoada was born — except that historians discovered the famous version is not true.

fiction

A Loja de Dona Cida

Dona Cida's Shop

A third-generation fabric shop in Salvador is slowly dying — until a stranger walks in looking for exactly what everyone else stopped wanting.

fiction

O Violão do Meu Pai

My Father's Guitar

A son from Ouro Preto inherits his silent father's guitar — and only then begins to understand everything the man never said.

nonfiction

Bossa Nova: A Revolução do Apartamento

Bossa Nova: The Apartment Revolution

How a handful of young people in small Copacabana apartments invented the quietest revolution in popular music.

fiction

O Bloco da Ladeira

The Bloco on the Hill

Tourists see four days of carnival in Olinda; Neide, who has run a small frevo bloco for twenty-three years, sees a year of work, debt, and devotion.

fiction

A Proposta

The Offer

An engineer who fled São Paulo for the easy life of Florianópolis gets a job offer that forces her to ask whether comfort has quietly become a cage.

nonfiction

Brasília: A Cidade que Nasceu de um Risco

Brasília: The City Born from a Sketch

A president's impossible promise, an architect's curves, and the forgotten workers who built a capital in the middle of nowhere in under four years.

fiction

As Primeiras Chuvas

The First Rains

After eleven months of drought in the Pernambuco sertão, an old couple's stubbornness is finally answered — and a son's promise takes the form of a prayer.

fiction

O Último Turno

The Last Shift

After thirty-two years assembling televisions in Manaus, a factory worker clocks out for the last time and weighs what the production line gave him against what it quietly took.

nonfiction

Cartas que Sobem o Rio

Letters That Travel Up the River

In the Amazon, where the road dissolves into water for half the year, the mail still arrives by boat — and e-commerce has made the river postman more necessary than ever.