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The Book of Disquiet is one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Written over the course of Fernando Pessoa's life, it was first published in 1982, pieced together from the thousands of individual manuscript pages left behind by Pessoa after his death in 1935. Now this fragmentary modernist masterpiece appears in a major new edition that unites Margaret Jull Costa's celebrated translation with the most complete version of the text ever produced. It is presented here, for the first time in English, by order of original composition, and accompanied by facsimiles of the original manuscript. Narrated principally by an assistant bookkeeper named Bernardo Soares - an alias of sorts for Pessoa himself - The Book of Disquiet is 'the autobiobraphy of someone who never existed', a mosaic of dreams, of hope and despair; a hymn to the streets and cafés of 1930s Lisbon, and an extraordinary record of the inner life of one of the century's most important writers. This new edition represents the most complete vision of Pessoa's genius.
Cipriano Algor, an elderly potter, lives with his daughter Marta
and her husband Marcal in a small village on the outskirts of The
Center, an imposing complex of shops, apartments, and offices to
which Cipriano delivers his pots and jugs every month. On one such
trip, he is told not to make any more deliveries. Unwilling to give
up his craft, Cipriano tries his hand at making ceramic dolls.
Astonishingly, The Center places an order for hundreds, and
Cipriano and Marta set to work-until the order is cancelled and the
three have to move from the village into The Center. When
mysterious sounds of digging emerge from beneath their apartment,
Cipriano and Marcal investigate, and what they find transforms the
family's life. Filled with the depth, humor, and the extraordinary
philosophical richness that marks each of Saramago's novels, The
Cave is one of the essential books of our time.
Tomás Nevinson, a retired MI6 agent, is working for the British Embassy
in Madrid when his former handler, the sinister Bertram Tupra, offers
to bring him back inside for one last assignment. His mission: to catch
and, if necessary, kill a terrorist gone to ground in Northern Spain
after bombings in Barcelona and Zaragoza. The trouble is there are
three suspects – all women – and it may not actually be any of them. To
find out, Nevinson must move incognito to the small town where the
three women separately live, and become an intimate friend to each, in
the hope of uncovering a clue . . .
This hand-picked selection from The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories celebrates the best literature to emerge from Spain since the twentieth century. From a poignant personal betrayal to a darkly humorous exchange between two wedding guests, this sparkling collection provides unique cultural insight and literary inspiration for language learners. Includes works from beloved authors such as Javier MarĂas, Carmen Laforet and more.
One night at the theatre, Vitor da Silva, a young law graduate, sees a strikingly beautiful woman. Her name is Genoveva. Originally from Madeira, she has lived for many many years in Paris. Her rich French husband has died and she is in Lisbon with a view possibly to settling there. Genoveva, however, is not what she seems. Behind the mutual attraction between her and Vitor lies a terrible secret.
The things I've learned from taxi drivers would be enough to fill a book. They know a lot: they really do get around. I may know a lot about Antonioni that they don't know. Or maybe they do even when they don't. There are various ways of knowing by not-knowing. I know: it happens to me too. The cronica, a literary genre peculiar to Brazilian newspapers, allows writers (or even soccer stars) to address a wide readership on any theme they like. Chatty, mystical, intimate, flirtatious, and revelatory, Clarice Lispector's pieces for the Saturday edition of Rio's leading paper, the Jornal do Brasil, from 1967 to 1973, take the forms of memories, essays, aphorisms, and serialized stories. Endlessly delightful, her insights make one sit up and think, whether about children or social ills or pets or society women or the business of writing or love. This new, large, and beautifully translated volume, Too Much of Life: The Complete Cronicas presents a new aspect of the great writer-at once off the cuff and spot on.
Gathered for the first time in English and spanning his entire career, Vampire in Love offers a selection of the Spanish master Enrique Vila-Matas's finest short stories. An effeminate, hunchbacked barber on the verge of death falls in love with a choir boy. A fledgling writer on barbiturates visits Marguerite Duras's Paris apartment and watches his dinner companion slip into the abyss. An unsuspecting man receives a mysterious phone call from a lonely ophthalmologist and visits his abandoned villa. The stories in Vampire in Love, selected and brilliantly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, are all told with Vila-Matas's delightful erudition and wit, and his provocative questioning of the interrelation of art and life.
Eca de Queiroz's sharply satirical work aimed to expose the hypocrisies of his age. In The Mandarin his lascivious anti-heroes Teodoro and Teodorico, are dragged from their narrow Lisbon lives into exotic encounters with Chinese mandarins, the Devil (in the guise of a dark-suited civil servant)and Jesus Christ Himself. This short novel is accompanied by the short stories Jose Matias, The Hanged Man and The Idiosyncrasies of a young blonde woman.
This exciting collection celebrates the richness and variety of the Spanish short story, from the nineteenth century to the present day. Featuring over fifty stories selected by revered translator Margaret Jull Costa, it blends old favourites and hidden gems - many of which have never before been translated into English - and introduces readers to surprising new voices as well as giants of Spanish literary culture, from Emilia Pardo Bazan and Leopoldo Alas, through Merce Rodoreda and Manuel Rivas, to Ana Maria Matute and Javier Marias. Brimming with romance, horror, history, farce, strangeness and beauty, and showcasing alluring hairdressers, war defectors, vampiric mothers, and talismanic mandrake roots, the daring and entertaining assortment of tales in The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories will be a treasure trove for readers.
"I passed away at two o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday in August in 1869, in my beautiful mansion in the Catumbi district of the city." So begins Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas-at the end of the narrator's life. Published in 1881, this highly experimental novel was not at first considered Machado de Assis' definitive work-a fact his narrator anticipated, bidding "good riddance" to the critic looking for a "run-of-the-mill-novel". Yet in this coruscating new translation, Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson reveal a pivotal moment in Machado's career, as his flights of the surreal became his literary hallmark. An enigmatic, amusing and frequently insufferable anti hero, Bras Cubas describes his Rio de Janeiro childhood spent tormenting household slaves, his bachelor years of torrid affairs and his final days obsessing over nonsensical poultices. A novel that helped launch modernist fiction, Bras Cubas shines a direct light to Ulysses and Love in the Time of Cholera.
A TLS Book of the Year This exhilarating collection of non-fiction sees one of the greatest twentieth-century writers meditating on the moments that make up a life 'How did I so unwittingly transform the joy of living into the great luxury of being alive?' Between 1967 and 1977, the internationally renowned author Clarice Lispector wrote weekly dispatches from her desk in Rio for the Jornal do Brasil. Already famous for her revolutionary, interior, metaphysical novels and short stories, in her Chronicles she turned her attention to the everyday, reshaping the material of her life into profound, touching and funny, tiny revelations. Observing the world around her, small encounters like hearing tales of the lost loves of a taxi driver, or the bitterness lurking beneath the prettiness of an old friend, become an exposition of the currents and foibles that define our lives. Everything from the meaning of cosmonauts to the new ideas, writers and artists that populate the sparkling international world of the sixties and seventies are considered and transformed into jewels of insight, delight and devastation. Sincere and playful, exhilarating and contemplative, Too Much of Life: Complete Chronicles opens up a new way of seeing the world.
A collection of insightful philosophical thoughts and stories, in which Paulo Coehlo offers inspiring answers to profound questions to delight spiritual seekers everywhere. It has proved to be a perfect gift-book in the few countries in which it has been published so far. This will be the first English translation.
Here, in Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari's splendid new translations, are the complete poems of Alberto Caeiro, the imaginary "heteronym" coterie created by Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese modernist master. Pessoa conceived Caeiro around 1914 and may have named him loosely after his friend, the poet Mario de Sa-Carrneiro. What followed was a collection of some of Fernando Pessoa's greatest poems, grouped under the titles The Keeper of Sheep, The Shepherd in Love, and Uncollected Poems. This imaginary author was a shepherd who spent most of his life in the countryside, had almost no education, and was ignorant of most literature; yet he (Pessoa) wrote some of the most beautiful and profound poems in Portuguese literature. This edition of The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro is based on the magnificent Portuguese Tinta-da-China edition, published in Lisbon in 2016, and contains an illuminating introduction by the Portuguese editors Jeronimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari, some facsimiles of the original Portuguese texts, and prose excerpts about Caeiro and his work written by Fernando Pessoa well as his other heteronyms Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, and other fictitious authors such as Antonio Mora and I. I. Crosse.
World—Ana LuĂsa Amaral’s second collection with New Directions—offers a new exhilarating set of poems that convey wonder, bemusement and an ever-deepening appreciation of life. Weaving the thread that connects the poem to life, World speaks of our immense human perplexity in the face of everything around us and our oneness with it all. As Amaral notes, all of us, “humans and non-humans, are on the same ontological level, the differences being only a matter of perspective. We are all made of the same stuff as dreams—and stars.” Asked about her thoughts on World, Amaral’s peerless translator Margaret Jull Costa replied: “What I take from this collection of poems is a sense of joy in the ordinary—seeing an ant going about its business, or a bee or a fish, or the feeling of sharing a whole history with a particular table, or watching a very ordinary woman sitting on a train playing with the handle of her handbag. World also brings us meditations on colonisation, slavery and whaling. Like the world, it is full of surprises and full of joy and sadness.” These vibrant, exultant poems invite you to share this marvellous world: Yes, all you need (how easy!) is to say yes.
Winner of the 2014 Marsh Award for Children's Literature Shola is a little dog with attitude. Frustratingly for her, she loves both comfort (mainly in the form of food) and adventure (in theory, at least), and spends much of her time trying to decide between the two. Whether she is faced with the possibility that she may really be a lion or the prospect of a boar-hunt, with eccentric American visitors or insufferable country bumpkins, Shola is not afraid to pursue her dreams ... up to a point. Lovingly and revealingly illustrated by Mikel Valverde, these four stories in one volume are a treasure-trove of amusement which cannot fail to cheer the reader. 'Mikel Valverde's illustrations are most expressive and the English translation comes courtesy of the great Margaret Jull Costa... Shola is one of the most impressive heroines of the modern world' Eileen Battersby, Irish Times 'A charming, witty, spirited collection of stories about the exploits of an irresistibly characterful little dog' Daniel Hahn, PEN Atlas Books of the Year 'Totally charming' Independent Children's books of the Year> 'Fabulous' Guardian Children's Books 'A short, sweet, and entertaining story... truly lovely illustrations and some wonderful wordplay-derived humour' The Book Wars 'First Spot, then Snowy and now Shola - children's literature has an illustrious history of plucky S-name canines... Mikel Valverde's illustrations are, like the best of cartoon strips, wittily and expressively detailed' Junior 'Funny and heart-warming stories, beautifully packaged and affectionately and cleverly illustrated' Lancashire Evening Post
Teolinda Gersao paints an extraordinarily evocative picture of childhood in Africa and the stark contrast between warm, lush, ebullient Mozambique and the bleak, poor, priggish Portugal of Salazar. 'Salazar's forty-year dictatorship in Portugal and that country's colonial wars in Africa cast their long shadow over Teolinda Gersao's The Word Tree. This is the first of Gersao's novels to be translated into English. As the Mozambican Laureano reflects, ' the men crossing the sea from Lisbon didn't want that absurd war either'. Laureano's wife Amelia had come to the country from Portugal in search of a better life, but mentally never leaves her homeland, whereas her daughter Gita loves the country and grows up to resent the colonial presence. There are lush descriptions of the country, while the racial order is starkly spelt out: Amelia 'clings to the belief that fair-skinned people are the very top of the racial hierarchy, and that dark-skinned Portuguese people are almost at the bottom, just above the Indians and the blacks'. Adrain Tahourdin in The Times Literary Supplement Margaret Jull Costa's translation was awarded The Calouste Gulbenkian Portuguese Translation Prize for 2012.
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