Blog
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My Real Mother Would Never
From “My Real Mother Would Never” (The Green and Purple Skin of the World) by paulo da costa: I didn’t plan on running away. It happened. You stare at me from down the street, and when we cross paths, you turn and shake your head as I walk along, stuffed rabbit under my arm, rainbow-coloured sling bag bulging with my comfort blanket and my Anne of Green Gables book collection biting my shoulder. If you stop and talk to me I’ll tell you, “My real mother would never do such a thing.” I’m dead sure my mother isn’t my real mother. I’ve got eyes. I mean, look at us. I…
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Story in Nashwaak Review
The Nashwaak Review (Vol. 28-29) from St. Thomas University in New Brunswick published in their latest issue the short-story: The Weight of Memory. TABLE OF CONTENTS Fiction Common Signs of Spring Andrea Schwenke Wyile The Auction Ann Lohner Lila Barbara Biles Shades of Grey Catherine Brunet Dolly Jonathan Greenbaum Visa Edward Gauvin The Tin Container Jeffrey Griffiths Dancing At the White Rose Ballroom Leanne Lieberman We All Considered This Sean Johnston August 5th Marnie Lamb Métisse Pascal Millet Bullfight Roger Moore Mary Had A Lamb P. J. Worrell The Weight of Memory paulo da costa Cardboard Genome Greg Shupak What We Know About Our Neighbors Tom Wayman Culture Shocks…
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New Story in Rampike
Rampike, the University of Windsor’s Literary Magazine, has just published in their latest issue (Vol 22/ N.1) one of my new works of fiction. Vol. 22/No. 1 (Re-recorded Histories): Carol Stetser, Phil Hall, Diane Schoemperlen, Collete Broeders & Samantha Therrien, Niels Hav, Alison Dilworth, Stephen Bett, Faruk Ulay, Brenda F. Pelkey, Norman Lock, Vittori Baroni, Christopher Prendergast & Joseph Hubbard, Hélène Samson & Guy Sioui-Durand & Norman Cornett & Edward Sheriff Curtis, Holly Anderson, Paulo da Costa, M.A.C. Farrant, Joanna Katchutas & Christina Spina, Kye Kocher, Brian Aldiss & Misha Nogha & Richard Truhlar, Orchid Tierney, Gerry Smith, Beatriz Hausner, Robert Dawson, Len Gasparini, Vicky Reuter, Nicole Markoti? & Meredith…
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Impressive Stories – Edmonton Journal
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Viva Da Costa
Viva Da Costa by Patricia Robertson Award-winning writer a hybrid spirit paulo da costa enjoys earthly pleasures now, and then confesses later “The gentle morning breeze found Prudêncio in his hammock, enveloped in a blanket of butterflies. The butterflies fanned their wings. The hammock swayed. Robins, perched on the hammock’s rope, sang. Through the overcast sky, a beam of sunshine wrapped Prudêncio’s body in gold. Frogs croaked a solemn requiem. Sunflowers graciously turned their heads and bowed. A white rain of almond petals floated from the sky. The morning had arrived to greet Prudêncio Casmurro before he returned to the earth.” – from The Scent of a Lie When…
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The Magic Is Simply A Door
a c o n v e r s a t i o n w i t h p a u l o d a c o s t a by Tamara Kaye Sellman I HAVE been having a kind of conversation with paulo da costa for at least four years now. He’d sent us a short story, “Hell’s Mouth Bay,” in response to Margin‘s first ever call for submissions. Naturally, we were slow in responding as we worked out our editorial processes, so when we finally decided we wanted to take his story, he had to write back with the unfortunate news that it had already been taken elsewhere and, consequently, it was no…
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Da Costa makes sense of the world with his writing;
Ian Doig. Calgary Herald . Calgary, Alta.: Oct 19, 2003 . pg. F.4 Interview with paulo da costa Calgary writer paulo da costa was born in Angola and raised in Portugal, before coming to Canada in 1989. His first novel, The Scent of a Lie, was awarded the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for best first book. Q: Why are you a writer? A: There’s two parts — to make sense of the world and to explore the different facets of life through different characters’ eyes. It’s like living different lives by entering other people’s perceptions and points of view. The other part…
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At Home in Two Cultures
A citizen of the world examines his multicultural identity paulo da costa, in conversation with Fernanda Viveiros In the words of Saint Augustine, “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” It could be said that writer paulo da costa has read many pages since immigrating to Canada in the late 1980s. Born in Luanda, Angola, and raised in Portugal, paulo has traveled throughout Europe and Brazil, lived in Calgary and on Cortes Island, and recently touched down in Silverton, a tiny hamlet in the Kootenay mountains. Now settled in Victoria, he is preparing to leave for a month-long stay in Portugal where…
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Canlit fabulism – Globe and Mail
Saturday, December 28, 2002 The Scent of a Lie By Paulo Da Costa With this book of linked stories, paulo da costa adds piquant new spice to the CanLit broth. Despite a recent Booker short list proving yet again that Canada’s writers are also the world’s, we’ve still lacked (I invite correction) a fiction hailing from Portuguese villages. Paying homage to a fabulist tradition running from Marquez and Borges and Carlos Fuentes all the way back to Cervantes, Da Costa evokes his God-beset, earthbound peasants, priests and villagers with palpable, redolent precision. Meanwhile, his setting in time remains indeterminate, suggesting a range that stretches across centuries, yet points unerringly to…
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New World Odour
Calgary writer paulo da costa’s short story collection The Scent of a Lie is the most uniformly fresh, sprightly, meaty work of Canadian fiction I’ve read in a long time. It came as a shock to me that the book had difficulty getting published. Now accumulating the attention it deserves, Da Costa’s book won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book (Canada and Caribbean Region)—as did similarly groundbreaking works such as Icefields by Thomas Wharton and Chorus of Mushrooms by Hiromi Goto—and just this week it was awarded the City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Book Prize. The linked collection of stories centres on the inhabitants of two small communities…
