AGE: 29
BASED IN: New York
NOW PLUGGING: Humpty Dumpty, November 2026
Boxing coach, stand-up comedian, author: Harold Rogers’s life is a grab bag of gigs that transmogrify vulnerability into something else entirely. In the Brazilian-American’s writing, the humor and hardship of self-exploration coalesce. His 2024 debut novel, Tropicália, sees its newly dumped protagonist’s life upended by the return of the family’s matriarch to Brazil. His follow-up, Humpty Dumpty, stars a high school quarterback whose shine is dimmed by a series of salacious revelations.
What’s writing for you? An act of agony? Delight?
Pure joy. The world is designed to diminish your freedom: siloing you into readymade patterns of thought and behavior. The world drifts toward perfect conformity: You buying shit all day in your spiritual cubicle… But when you write, you have the opportunity to be the most yourself: to actually think, invent, and be free!
What’s one work that crystallized your voice?
I read Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne over a week, trembling through a blizzard in my frozen apartment in New York. My roommate was out of town; my room was impossibly cold. I dragged my mattress out into the living room. All I did was read this wild novel from 1759, kept alive by the heat of my chattering teeth. I couldn’t believe a work so old was so warm, hilarious, and alive. Tristram Shandy reminded me: You can actually do whatever the fuck you want in a novel.
Describe a moment when you lost faith. What would you tell that younger writer?
Oh, this was very humiliating… In undergrad, I was in a literary magazine called Inklings. We would review the submissions together in a room, anonymously. I submitted this cantankerously tortured poem I thought was a work of genius; when it came up for review, I sat back, ready for a standing ovation. Instead, this girl I had a crush on said, “I literally can’t with this one.” And she started cracking up. The laughter spread; everyone had to stifle themselves as I sat there with a huge hee-haw smile on my face… I would tell my younger self to do exactly what he did: Give up poetry!
What three books make up your personal canon?
I was having lunch with a Brazilian writer, Sérgio Rodrigues (whose novel The Move I’m translating); he said a New Yorker reporter called him once to ask questions about Paulo Coelho. She asked, “Why do you think other Brazilian writers haven’t broken through?” He said, “Well, Paulo Coelho doesn’t have a lot to do with the Brazilian literary tradition.” She said, “Brazil has a literary tradition?” I’m Brazilian-American: I read in Portuguese, and Brazilian literature is so underrated worldwide. I’ll tell you the three most important Brazilian books to me: Dom Casmurro, 1899, by Machado de Assis; Vastlands: The Crossing by João Guimarães Rosa; and Pornographic Trilogy, 1991, by Hilda Hilst.
What do you think your generation should read more—and less—of?
It’s hard for me to believe so many people read these self-help books where the content is completely in the title. My friend was reading The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins. Guess what the key to the book is? Let them! I don’t think you should waste your time on shit that bores you. Or you might think some dust-cluttered tome is too difficult or a waste of your time, like I used to. But if you challenge yourself, you might be surprised. The canon is not really the invention of lame tweedy professors, but a record of the books that regular people read generation after generation.
in your life?
