Dear readers...
“When I still couldn't read, I played with books and imagined them full of voices, telling the world”.
Cecília Meireles
Someone has already said, and I fully agree, that encouraging a taste for reading is planting a seed with the certainty that it will bear good fruit. It has also been said that reading is a stimulus and an example; it's a unique way of traveling through time, of being in places we've never been and that, many times, no longer exist or never existed in fact, except in the fertile imagination of those who imagined them; it is a form of happiness, which revives memory and allows us to penetrate the unknown, broadening our thinking and helping us to reveal who we are. As Cervantes said, “He who reads a lot and walks a lot, goes far and knows a lot”. And I say more: reading good literature is a necessary condition for becoming a good reader and a good writer. Someone asks: “But... why read the classics”? Ítalo Calvino, who also asked himself this question, answers: “A classic is a book that never finished saying what it had to say”. A classic is one that always has something new to tell us.
With that in mind, we have collected here are several classics written in Portuguese and many others written in foreign languages_cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b-94bad5cf58d_ecc51_ecc51_ecc57 translated into Portuguese; -bb3b-136bad5cf58d_in addition to literary publications that did not enter the canon, remaining under the ashes for many years, until they were discovered and revealed to the current public. This is the case of the hitherto unknown novelUrsula, by the Maranhão writer Maria Firmina dos Reis, originally published in 1859, and recently re-edited and made available to the general public.
The works gathered here belong to the public domain and some of them are available at www.dominiopublico.gov.br, are not updated according to the New Orthographic Agreement of the Portuguese Language, which officially came into force from 2009, in Portugal, and from 2016, in Brazil._cc781905-5cde- 3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_We ask readers to pay attention to this detail.
Boa part of the classics, listed in this section, were updated and offered, graciously, by the virtual publishers Free Books and Iba Mendes. These can also be found on websites www.freebookseditora.com e www.poeteiro.com, who have been rendering an important and commendable service to the dissemination of good literature to all Portuguese speakers.
We hope, by making these works available, to contribute to the formation of a taste for reading among our students and all those who accept the challenge of going beyond what they know, opening doors and windows to a fascinating universe of possibilities. A great experience for everyone!