Hugs and Cuddles

“Completely consuming…Hugs and Cuddles laughs at gender, but takes sex seriously. It is both prurient and philosophical, gleefully dirty and wrenchingly serious.”
—Lily Meyer, NPR 

“Wild, singular, and unapologetically original, this is a perfect read for anyone who wants to step off the beaten path into something unfamiliar and unforgettable.”
—BuzzFeed (Best New Books of October)

“Noll’s novel proposes a new model of sociality, one in which sexual reciprocity is the basis of social exchange. Here, erotic encounters become testing grounds for new political systems and kinship configurations. In this fictional world, where values such as fluidity, collectivity, and jouissance prevail, where bodies are constituted by desire and condemned to be free, self-renunciation may be the key to communion.”
—Jenny Wu, Astra Mag

“Imagine a gay porn collaboration by Dali and David Lynch…it’s like the transcription of a dream, surging from one scenario to the next, graphic sex scenes melting into cerebral ponderings which flow into further erotica. As with the work of William S. Burroughs, engaging with Hugs and Cuddles feels like taking a drug as much as reading a book.”
—Passport Magazine

“Hugs and Cuddles might be the most João Gilberto Noll title to be translated yet. Plenty of novels open with a narrator looking back on a seismic incident from their youth, but very few of them take things to the place where Noll ends this particular book—a dizzying study in transformation and intimacy.”
—Words Without Borders

“Childhood friends reunite, setting off an exploration into the depths of personhood in João Gilberto Noll’s explicit novel Hugs and Cuddles.…The seamless, lyrical translation from Portuguese does not leave room to misunderstand the narrator’s wants or needs.…Erotic and emotional, it does not fan the flames of prurient desire, but makes visceral the knowing of one’s own body and the feeling of learning another body, however briefly, in relation.…Hugs and Cuddles is a taut fever dream of a novel wherein the body and the sensations it experiences are all that’s real.”
—Foreword Reviews

“Late Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll offers a breathless exploration of a Porto Alegre man’s sexuality and desire.…[Hugs and Cuddles] transcends erotica for a memorable story of an attempt at liberation.”
—Publishers Weekly

“In this posthumous genre- and gender-bending novel, Noll writes about a man embarking on a transgressive journey of self-discovery while his nation is ravaged around him.”
—The Millions (Most Anticipated Books of 2022)

“A provocative novel about a Brazilian man’s urgent desire for queer connection throughout his life.”
—The Bay Area Reporter

“So far from anything else I’ve read that is looking at bodies in transformation…I’m in awe.”
—Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“Hugs and Cuddles is a relentless sex-saturated fantasia that refuses the boundaries between experience and imagination—always morphing, always shifting, breaking open desire to feel more desire.”
—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door

“João Gilberto Noll’s unique writing explores the mental whirlwind caused by the mystery of desire. In Hugs and Cuddles, our deepest, most intimate erotic transformations are elaborated and played like free jazz by a virtuoso. This is what great literature tastes like, in another brilliant translation by Edgar Garbelotto.”
—Juan Cárdenas, author of Ornamental

“A probing exploration of dysfunctional Brazilian politics, with a HEAVY emphasis on ‘probing.’ Hugs and Cuddles is a difficult, thrilling, utterly singular take on the plague novel and an erotic fable of becoming. Handle with gloves, and watch out for bodily fluids.”
—Terrance Hudson, Epilogue Books (Chapel Hill, NC)

“An utterly strange and sexy romp of a novel, this work in translation echoes that of the late Clarice Lispector in its refusal to capitulate to normative conventions of the novel. Hugs and Cuddles follows a restless and dissatisfied protagonist who attempts to satiate his malaise via impassioned sexual encounters with other men, real or imagined. This is a novel to be savored, wherein the point isn’t the plot so much as the intensity of emotion and bewilderment found between these pages.”
—Malik Thompson, Loyalty Books (Washington D. C.)

“Brave, majestic and unapologetically explicit, Hugs and Cuddles may be Noll’s grand achievement. A society in decay, an insatiable narrator overcome by lust, and a journey through the chaotic heart of a Brazil, these are only some of the elements in Noll’s unforgettable novel.”
—Ülrika Moats, Brazos Bookstore (Houston, TX) 

“A psychosexual, protean fantasia about life, love, lust, gender, violence, identity, and sex. A complete waterslide of a novel that that will leave readers feeling transformed and a maybe a little moist.”
—Luis Correa, Avid Bookshop (Athens, GA)

“Literature should be taken seriously. Until it shouldn’t. The narrator of João Gilberto Noll’s Hugs and Cuddles says they want to be God, and succeeds in a way. Only a writer reaching for the divine could share Noll’s insane, repugnant, sexual imagination—but what makes Hugs and Cuddles of great interest is the explicit nature of its queer imagination and gender dysphoria. Noll’s narrator practices the ‘craft’ of all genders, while parodying the fetid language of pornography and the ‘eternal hell of libido.’ Brazilian literature, to my knowledge, has never looked like this. On occasion, a novel comes along that requires difficult reading, generosity that borders on obsession, and in return we’re rattled alive. Language can disturb and disgust and offend and make us lust (or uneasy) all at once. Hugs and Cuddles is relentless in its command, for better or worse. I cannot emphasize this enough: open up; proceed with abandon.”
—Spencer Ruchti, Third Place Books (Seattle, WA)

“The title Hugs and Cuddles belies the absolutely filthy nature of this book. The narrator, “hopelessly trapped in sexual damnation” pushes the bounds of gender and genre in this wet-dream-within-a-fever-dream of a novel. Boldly and luridly translated by Edgar Garbelotto, Noll’s tale is to be read as compulsively and as furtively as his character conducts his exploits— and then to be exposed to the world.”
—Noah Mintz, Community Bookstore (Brooklyn, NY)

“An erogenous Golgotha, Hugs and Cuddles represents the site of an indelible transgression.”
—Justin Walls, Bookshop

“Noll is a hero of Brazilian literature who deserves to be widely known in the English-speaking world.”
—Jenny Offill, author of Weather

“Noll is a master of prose, one of Brazil’s true literary icons.”
—Literary Hub