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Sources

Dog Walker, The Man Behind The Canine Wheelchair

Glauber Pereira Souza and one of the dog he took care of
Glauber Pereira Souza and one of the dog he took care of
Fernanda Testa

SERTÃOZINHO — In a simple house here, 330 kilometers northwest of São Paulo in Brazil, Glauber Pereira Souza, 36, is the head of a four-legged family: He owns five dogs, two cats and two rabbits.

The youngest member of his household is Preta, a mongrel female who had been run over by a bus, but miraculously survived. Glauber adopted Preta after her accident. But he did more than that. He made her mobile again by crafting a special wheelchair for her. Petra wasn't the first to benefit from Glauber's care. Glauber's helpful hands have already improved the lives of more than 2,400 dogs across Brazil.

It all began in February 2015, after a friend asked Glauber to help her paralyzed dog. "The poor thing was suffering from advanced-stage canine distemper," Glauber recalls. "It couldn't even move its neck anymore. My friend was desperately looking for a wheelchair so her dog could at least stand on its legs.

Since the wheelchair was working fine, I decided to turn this activity into a gesture of charity for other animals.

Glauber took online tutorials and used the synthetic plastic polymer PVC to make the chair in about 20 days. It was such a success that his grateful friend created a Facebook page for Glauber to showcase his work.

"I've always had that instinct of helping, caring. Since the wheelchair was working fine, I decided to turn this activity into a gesture of charity for other animals. By word of mouth, I've come to make wheelchairs for dogs across the region and country," he says.

Rolling Dalmatian Photo: Assistencia para locomoção de pets em geral Facebook page

Despite being unemployed, Glauber only charges customers the cost of the material. Depending on the size and weight of the animals, it can cost the owner from 20 reais to 190 reais ($6 to $60), while those available in shops usually cost at least 450 reais ($140).

Glauber now makes four to five wheelchairs a day. Even veterinarians recommend him to their patients. Although Glauber loves to make dog-owners happy, it's the reactions of the dogs themselves that motivates him the most.

"All the ones I attend to in person come and lick me whenever they see me. It's as if they wanted to thank me for my help," he says.

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Ideas

Shame On The García Márquez Heirs — Cashing In On The "Scraps" Of A Legend

A decision to publish a sketchy manuscript as a posthumous novel by the late Gabriel García Márquez would have horrified Colombia's Nobel laureate, given his painstaking devotion to the precision of the written word.

Photo of a window with a sticker of the face of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with butterfly notes at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Poster of Gabriel Garcia Marquez at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Juan David Torres Duarte

-Essay-

BOGOTÁ — When a writer dies, there are several ways of administering the literary estate, depending on the ambitions of the heirs. One is to exercise a millimetric check on any use or edition of the author's works, in the manner of James Joyce's nephew, Stephen, who inherited his literary rights. He refused to let even academic papers quote from Joyce's landmark novel, Ulysses.

Or, you continue to publish the works, making small additions to their corpus, as with Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett and Clarice Lispector, or none at all, which will probably happen with Milan Kundera and Cormac McCarthy.

Another way is to seek out every scrap of paper the author left and every little word that was jotted down — on a piece of cloth, say — and drip-feed them to publishers every two to three years with great pomp and publicity, to revive the writer's renown.

This has happened with the Argentine Julio Cortázar (who seems to have sold more books dead than alive), the French author Albert Camus (now with 200 volumes of personal and unfinished works) and with the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. The latter's posthumous oeuvre is so abundant I am starting to wonder if his heirs haven't hired a ghost writer — typing and smoking away in some bedsit in Barcelona — to churn out "newly discovered" works.

Which group, I wonder, will our late, great novelist Gabriel García Márquez fit into?

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