Vários - Querosene

When there's nothing to do, a match is lit.

In Portugal, boredom is fought with fire, and there's only one effective way to kill time: once and for all.

This book is a guide to dealing with places where nothing happens: based on the Big Black song and taking the band's suggestion literally, it shares testimonies from those who, having experienced the indolence of Portugal's small towns, villages, and villages, found themselves pondering the possibilities of pyromania. Whether about the appalling architecture or the pious people who inhabit it, the stories gathered here document the frustrations and anxieties of those who didn't grow up in the hustle and bustle of Porto or Lisbon and, missing the excitement of the metropolis, saw the bonfire as the only cure for lethargy.

In the LowCCCost collection, for those who enjoy "traveling without taking public transport or spending money," there have been many detours: from the boredom of Europe to Guinea-Bissau, passing through a convent of silent monks in Évora, or the island of Príncipe during the 1919 eclipse. Like the other titles in this collection, this isn't a cheesy tourist guide: Kerosene, like previous volumes—Zona de Desconforto (Best Comic Book of 2014) and Lisboa é Very Very Typical—brings together authors, sometimes amateurs, sometimes established, who open up in the always uncomfortable intimacy of autobiography. In the sum of this transmission of individual states of mind, one learns more about the country than through INE data: the results, perhaps unsurprisingly, raise questions about the secularism of its people or the future of its young population.