An undisputed giant of twentieth-century Portuguese letters, writer and literary critic Jorge de Sena (1919--1978) spent the most Productive decades of his life away from Portugal, teaching at the University of Wisconsin--Madison and the University of California, Santa Barbara. In the essays gathered in this collection, George Monteiro deftly weaves together his readings of Sena's poetry and prose, both literary and critical, with evidence drawn from the deep well of Sena's biographical archive, focusing in particular on his Brazilian and U.S. years. This expansive overview of Sena's unparalleled career, intended to commemorate the centenary of the writer's birth, is also a tribute to Monteiro's own remarkably voluminous and far-reaching body of work on the intersection of Portuguese and Anglo-American literary studies.

Stormy Isles, originally published in Portuguese in 1944 and set in the Azores between 1917 and 1919, focuses on the vivacious and sharp Margarida, who, at twenty years of age, is a model of feminist aspirations and the paragon of her generation. A member of the elite, she foregoes some of the entitlements of her class and struggles with the morals of the bourgeois society in which her life unfolds. Narrated in realist and poetic language as a series of interconnected tales within a larger story, this completely revised translation of Stormy Isles provides a rich, vivid portrait of the Azores in the early twentieth century.

Equating Vitorino Nemesio to "Azoreanity," Universality, Iridescence, Confluence, and Eroticism, draws inspiration from the content of the essays herein included and will not surprise anyone familiar with Nemesio's non-posthumous works, with the possible exception of the very last of the lexemes, "eroticism." Nemesio's oeuvre, starting with the collections of short stories Paco do Milhafre (1924) and Misterio do Paco do Milhafre (1949), and extending to the poetical collections La Voyelle Promise (1935) and Festa Redonda (1950), to the novel Mau Tempo no Canal (1944) and the travelogue Corsario das Ilhas (1956), encompasses a range of subjects profoundly rooted in the Azorean archipelago. At the same time--and here, bbesides Mau Tempo no Canal, we must emphasize the poems of Nem Toda a Noite a Vida (1952) and O Verbo e a Morte (1959)--the thematic and formal scope of Nemesio's oeuvre does in no way distance itself from the totality (and, to the extent that the word is valid, centrality) of Portugese culture and, as well, from the western Great Tradition of which it is an inextricable part.