Reviews
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Enclosures
Check out this podcast from Reckoning Magazine where the editor Michael DeLuca talks about my essay Enclosures. You can read the complete text too or download the podcast to listen at your leisure … whenever and wherever . Enjoy! Podcast Episode 18: Enclosures https://reckoning.press/?powerpress_embed=3058-podcast&powerpress_player=mediaelement-audio Today I’m going to read you an essay by paulo da costa, “Enclosures”, from Reckoning 6. I think of this piece as a new perspective in an ongoing conversation that started, for me, with Kate Schapira’s essay “On Political Change, Climate Change, and the Choice to Not Have Children” that appeared in Catapult in 2017, and my editorial piece in Reckoning 2, “On Having a Kid…
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James H. Gray Award for Short Nonfiction
WGA CNF Award HR Winners of the 2020 Alberta Literary Awards The Writers’ Guild of Alberta is pleased to announce the winners of the 2020 Alberta Literary Awards. This year’s award winners were announced in an online video release on June 4th. The video is available to watch on our Facebook page and YouTube channel. This celebration marks the 38th anniversary of the Alberta Literary Awards and brought together writers from across Alberta.The Alberta Literary Awards were created by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta in 1982 to recognize excellence in writing by Alberta authors. This year, jurors deliberated over 220 submissions to select winners in the following eight categories. James…
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Canadian Writers Abroad – reviews Midwife of Torment
The Midwife of Torment & Other Stories, Guernica Editions: 2017, 202 pages. Reviewed by Irene Marques Calling Us into Seeing and Being More: “Me” and the World The Midwife of Torment & Other Stories by paulo da costa is a book of short stories, or sudden fictions [under 1,000 words], divided into six parts: “Affections,” “Slowness,” “Aqua Libera,” “Beneath Our Beds,” “Force” and “Fathers.” In this collection, we find provoking thoughts unveiled slowly in an incantatory, lyrical language, revealing our deepest yearnings, frustrations, losses, insufficiencies, and happiness(es), too. His work makes us see, feel and be more: to have profound insights into our lives and the world; to understand…
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Short-listed for the James H. Gray Award for Short Nonfiction
The creative non-fiction “Learning to Shave, Learning to Leave” originally published by The Fiddlehead, has been short-listed for an Alberta Literary Award. Congratulations to all the finalists. James H. Gray Award for Short Nonfiction Paulo da Costa (Calgary) — “Learning to Shave, Learning to Leave” (The Fiddlehead) Jennifer Bowering Delisle (Edmonton) — “Abracadabra” (The Forge) Omar Mouallem (Edmonton) — “Billionaires, Bombers, and Bellydancers” (The Ringer) The Writers’ Guild of Alberta is excited to announce the finalists for the 2020 Alberta Literary Awards and Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. Each year, the Alberta Literary Awards and the City of Edmonton recognize and celebrate the highest standards of literary excellence…
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Obligatory reading for the North American Luso Diaspora – impressions by Diniz Borges
Diniz Borges on Beyond Bullfights & Ice Hockey (essays) Just began to read this new book of essays by paulo da costa. The first essay is amazing. Paulo is a great writer. The title of the book is great. Indeed, beyond some of these stereotypical cliches that we slap in the Portuguese experience in North-America. Paulo writes from a Portuguese-Canadian experience, not very different from ours here in the US. I will continue reading this great book of essays and it will be, I’m sure, one of future articles for the Portuguese language press in the US and in the Azores. Congrats to Boavista Press for the publication. Acabo de…
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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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Enclosures
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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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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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Sharp and True – a book review by the Coastal Spectator
Collection’s stories are sharp and true May 23, 2013 The Green and Purple Skin of the World By paulo da costa Freehand Books, 208 pages, $21.95 Reviewed by Yasuko Thanh Born in Angola, raised in Portugal, paulo da costa won the Commonwealth First Book Prize in 2003 for his collection The Scent of a Lie. In The Green and Purple Skin of the World, his first book of short fiction in 10 years, language and its power form a thread through many of the stories and words are highlighted in entertaining characters such as Dona Branca, who collects newspaper clippings of disasters and glues them in an old photo album.…
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Unhurried & Meditative – A National Post review
paulo da costa is concerned with the passage of time and its effects on generational attitudes and memories. Da costa’s writing is recondite, preferring a lyrical, almost poetic style of narration. The stories in The Green and Purple Skin of the World (Freehand Books, 206 pp; $21.95) have an unhurried, meditative aspect that suits the material, but can also be wearisome over the course of an entire collection. The Table is typical of many of the stories in the book. Not much happens on the level of plot; the author is more concerned with dissecting the relationship between a mother and her son, and using that relationship to examine the…
