Almir Miguel Jr.

Almir Miguel Jr. is a physician in the interior of southern Brazil. He came to medicine from the exact sciences, and that double training — the habit of measurement set against the unreliability of the body — runs through his fiction. The Dean of Lucifer is his debut novel, published in episodes.

He came to medicine from the exact sciences, and the meeting of those two disciplines — the instinct to measure, set against a body that will not hold still to be measured — is the ground his fiction grows from. The Dean of Lucifer is his debut, written and published first in Brazilian Portuguese and now appearing in English.

The novel keeps its setting: the interior of southern Brazil, its winters and wood stoves and long roads to the nearest city. It is a book about perception and proof, about the record a careful person keeps to hold on to what they saw — and about what happens when the record itself begins to look like the symptom.