News
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The Guest who refuses to be polite – impressions by Emanuel Melo
I’m hanging out with paulo da costa these days. On the crowded subway ride to work in the morning and again in the evening on the way home I listen to him; those around me don’t. But I prefer listening to him when I get inside my solitude, sitting on my sofa, in the quiet of my library, where I can be attentive without the pull of people’s chatter. Even at four in the morning, when I cannot sleep, he is still talking. Non-stop. He is the guest who refuses to go home at a decent hour and so, to be polite, I let him speak his words. He gives…
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New book: Beyond Bullfights and Ice Hockey
Beyond Bullfights and Ice Hockey Essays on Identity, Language and Writing Culture A book of twelve essays, musings, thoughts, inner conversations, arguments and rambles written over the course of two decades. For those who believe the book is obsolete and has been overtaken by other cultural platforms and technologies in our increasingly fast-moving times, I remind myself that the book is a marker of sanity for the human spirit. It will always be a measure of how far we humans have fallen off our cultural and spiritual balance. The book is an intimate match to the rhythm of our consciousness, our state of being present in the world, our hunger…
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New poem in CV2
CV2 – Vol 39 – Issue 4 This issue brings you a conversation with one of Canada’s most innovative, not to mention outspoken, poets, George Murray about writing, aging and Diversion, George’s most recent collection, as well as his stint as St. John’s Poet Laureate. And because this is the Open Issue there is, of course, lots of poetry of all shapes, sizes and inclinations. Not only will you find a selection of envelope-pushing new work by featured poet George Murray, but also a whole range of new writing from the poetic likes of Christophe Schinckus, Jessica Bebenek, Müesser Yeniay, paulo da costa and David Cavanagh, to mention a…
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The Cartography of Being – by Nuno Judice – Reviewed in The Malahat Review
Nuno Júdice, The Cartography of Being, translated by Paulo da Costa (Victoria: Livros Pé D’Orelha, 2012). Paperbound, 126 pp., $17.95. Poetry Review by David Swartz Nuno Júdice’s poetry is dense, rich, lyrical and, above all, philosophical. It expresses a philosophy that equates poetry with every aspect of life, and a portrait of the poet in the act of self-creation through the making of poetry. In The Cartography of Being, Paulo da Costa’s selection and translation of fifty-one of Júdice’s poems written between 1967 and 2005, presented side by side with the Portuguese, captures the flow, rhythm, cadence, and overall meaning of the poet’s original creations. Júdice is…
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The Midwife of Torment – forthcoming book
The Midwife of Torment (sudden fictions) to be published in 2017 by Guernica Editions Meanwhile, enjoy two story excerpts from this forthcoming book: Pleasant Troubles The Midwife of Torment
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Malahat Review – Seamless Stories Haunt
The January 2014 issue (#185) of the University of Victoria’s Malahat Review features a review of The Green and Purple Skin of the World. Fiction Review by Norma Lundberg The Green and Purple Skin of the World: Stories by paulo da costa (Freehand, 2013). Paperbound, 208 pp., $21.95 The sixteen stories in this collection proceed so seamlessly a reader might initially suspect them of being slight—a smooth skin of words, a faint echo from the title. But just as our skin is only the surface of our complex bodies, these stories are alive with characters in their own complicated worlds. They slowly enter the reader and haunt…
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to be portuguese
to be portuguese is to be born with the fado around your neck to live with your eyes anchored to the open sea, longing for the outgoing tide or for its incoming wave living canned up between the sea and spain exporting sardines going to mass and forgetting the sermon it’s confessing to friends with a bottle in your hand and not making waves the ones that stir up the sea are enough praying for peace admiring fátima and batalha in the same holy visit to be portuguese is to love your car more than yourself and find it more affordable …
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Memória: An Anthology of Portuguese Canadian Writers
This first anthology of Portuguese Canadian writers serves as a superb introduction which cogently illustrates the emerging presence of Portuguese literary voices within the Canadian landscape. Embedded in its cultural meaning system, it provides a background upon which the scope of the texts can be located. In fact, the poetic and narrative texts, central to the fabric woven throughout this volume, involve not only the exploration of narrative memory and identity, but also paint a vibrant picture of the Portuguese diasporic world in which these writers live. Congratulations to editor Fernanda Viveiros for the initiative, and for presenting us with this rich and sophisticated selection. I am confident that the…
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The Green and Purple Skin of the World – The Quill & Quire Review
The May issue of Quill & Quire features a review of The Green and Purple Skin of the World. The world described in paulo da costa’s second book of short fiction is a sensual one. A poet and translator, da costa favours imagistic language to explore characters’ relationships to one another and to nature, depicting a scenic tapestry of interpersonal phenomena that spans love, war, aging, and death. The book’s 16 stories tend to be brief, but the longer and more complex pieces are the most satisfying. A prioritization of setting and atmosphere over plot is established in the first story, “Flies,” in which two older Portuguese men lament the…
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Beneath Thin Skin – BC Bookworld feature
In BC’s Bookworld Summer Issue: a brief blurb and mini-interview on my new book. Beneath Thin Skin Possibly B.C.’s only Angolan-born author, paulo da costa was raised in Vale de Cambra, Portugal and arrived in Canada in 1989. Having won Best First Book, Canada & Caribbean Region of the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2003, the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize in 2002 and the Canongate Prize for Short-Fiction in 2001, da costa moved to B.C. in 2003 and now lives on Vancouver Island. His stories have been translated to Italian, Chinese, Spanish, Serbian, Slovenian and Portuguese. His new fiction collection is The Green and Purple Skin of the World…
