Editor's Note

What you are read­ing is a ban­quet, col­lect­ively pre­pared by the care­ful hands of Brazilian writers, copy­ed­it­ors, trans­lat­ors, and ed­it­ors. It’s also a lot of firsts for Eita! Magazine: its first bi­lin­gual and themed is­sue; its first crowd­fun­ded one; and its first is­sue, period, of 2022.

Eita! Magazine is still a very young little thing. As of the re­lease of this is­sue (numbered 2 but ac­tu­ally our third ven­ture in the world of edit­ing Brazilian SFF fic­tion in Eng­lish), we’ve only been around for about a year and a half. It’s not a lot, but what we’ve achieved dur­ing this short period of time ac­tu­ally is.

With is­sue #0, our very first at­tempt at this, we had the pleas­ure of hav­ing one of our stor­ies short-lis­ted for the Sci­ence Fic­tion and Fantasy Rosetta Awards 2020, in the Best SFF trans­lated work: Short-form cat­egory with “The Witch Dances”, writ­ten by Thi­ago Am­brósio Lage, trans­lated by yours truly and copy­ed­ited by Mar­ina Fer­reira. As much as we in­vest time and tal­ent (all un­paid) in the zine and ex­pect to go far, the short­l­ist came as a sur­prise—yes, we did ex­pect to get there, but someday, not with our first try! It was such tent­at­ive pro­ject still that we numbered the first is­sue as #0, just in case, you know.

We had no idea where we were get­ting ourselves into. At the time, our team didn’t have any ex­per­i­ence on the anglo­phone mar­ket. We barely knew any­one. We were just a bunch of trans­lat­ors, copy­ed­it­ors, and ed­it­ors with a lot of cour­age and a pinch of in­san­ity to get this thing star­ted.

Alas, we did not win that Rosetta cat­egory, but what they say about be­ing an honor just to be nom­in­ated is ab­so­lutely true to Eita! Magazine, es­pe­cially com­ing right out of the gate with is­sue #0! This sort of re­cog­ni­tion fuels our pas­sion for this pro­ject, and know­ing that our au­thors have been read from Ja­pan to Europe to the USA is also some­thing that makes us feel ac­com­plished.

To think of the amount of sup­port the zine has gathered makes me emo­tional—we found good in­ter­na­tional friends across the globe, ex­pat­ri­ate Brazili­ans will­ing to help the pro­ject along, loyal Patreon sub­scribers, and now, by be­com­ing bi­lin­gual, we found within our Brazilian writ­ing com­munity the same fire our en­tire team has. In less than a week­end, we were able to raise 100% of the crowd­fund­ing money we needed to launch this is­sue. Not only that, we made 175% of our goal and we were able to add one more au­thor to our Table of Con­tents!

Des­pite everything our coun­try has been go­ing through with the cur­rent (dis)ad­min­is­tra­tion, we were able to keep this pro­ject go­ing with the sup­port of na­tional and in­ter­na­tional com­munit­ies, in the hopes that it’ll bring not only good things to our au­thors but also a little solace in such dark, dark times. Through fic­tion, we want to do whatever we can to make this real­ity a little more bear­able, by bring­ing for­ward di­versity in the form of many dif­fer­ent voices.

In the past two years, about 37 Brazilian writers have been pub­lished in anglo­phone zines[1]. Of these, 16 were pub­lished by Eita! Magazine in its year and half act­ive, about 45%; all of them well-paid for the Brazilian mar­ket stand­ards. That makes us very happy and it shows that we are achiev­ing our goal of show­cas­ing Brazilian voices through stor­ies of fancy and dis­be­lief. This is­sue is no dif­fer­ent.

We have a di­verse set of au­thors from all over the coun­try, dare I say the most di­verse bunch of Brazilian au­thors you’ll get to read in Eng­lish (for now)! There is a story for every taste: rural hor­ror with Fre­derico To­scano’s Buchada, a story of hun­ger set in the deep ser­tão of Brazil; a pinch of New Weird and fantasy with Giu Yukari Murakami’s Through Batchan’s Hands, about memory and culin­ary her­it­age; a spoon­ful of witch story and rep­res­ent­a­tion in Saren Ca­margo’s Granny’s house, on a coun­tryside back­drop full of homely ma­gic; a slice of very Brazilian sci­ence fic­tion with Luísa Montenegro’s The Alien’s Feast, about how a group of brave Brazili­ans wel­comes an outer space vis­itor; a scoop of ghosts in Wilson Júnior’s Free Womb, a story of re­venge and a skil­ful baker; and, fi­nally, a dash of clas­sical hor­ror with Thomaz Lopes’ The De­ceased, in which death and hun­ger en­twine.

Hope you’re ready for this feast of stor­ies. Sa­vor them care­fully, each one has a fla­vor of its own.

Iana A.

Ed­itor-in-Chief

Re­cife, Brazil

Janu­ary 2022

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[1] Ac­cord­ing to Dante Luiz’ In­dex of Brazilian SFFH Writ­ing in Eng­lish.