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Impressive Stories – Edmonton Journal
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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…
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Tricked by the dusk – Toronto Star
From Cowtown to Portugal, with love Spare, poetic tales of ordinary people Once upon a time, not so very long ago, in a windblown modern city in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, a young Angola-born man sat down to tell wonderful, enchanting stories set in lands far, far away. These are stories about people and lives far removed from our contemporary bustle, but the emotional and imaginative truths they portray resonate long after the pages have been turned. The Scent Of A Lie, a collection of 14 related short stories by Calgary writer and editor Paulo da Costa, marks the debut of a remarkable writer. Artists in any…
