After the war, I thought all that was left was ashes, hollow ruins . . . Today, I know that’s not true. Where man remains, a seed, too, survives, a dream to inseminate time.
Published in the aftermath of Mozambique’s bloody civil war, Mia Couto’s third collection seeks out the places violence could not reach, the places where, the author writes, “every man is the same: pretending he’s here, dreaming of going away, and plotting his return.” Shifting masterfully between forms—creation tale to meditation, playful comedy to magical twist—these stories grapple with questions of what’s been lost and what can be reclaimed, what future exists for a country that broke the yoke of colonialism only to descend into internecine war, what is Mozambican and what is Mozambique. Following fishermen and fortune-tellers, widows and drunks, and one errant hippopotamus, this new translation of stories by the Man Booker-listed author of Confession of the Lioness rediscovers possibility and what it means to be reborn.
style=’text-align: left;’>Finalist for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize
style=’text-align: left;’>Winner of the Neustadt Prize for Literature, 2014
style=’text-align: left;’>Winner of the Camões Prize for Literature, 2013
A Vanity Fair Must-Read Book From Around The World for Winter 2019
A Financial Times Summer Book of 2019
Giới thiệu về tác giả
Born in Beira, Mozambique, Mia Couto was director of the Mozambican state news agency during the years following his country’s independence from Portugal, and later worked as a newspaper editor and journalist. Since the late 1980s, he has combined the profession of environmental biologist with that of writer. Couto is the author of nearly 30 books of fiction, essays and poems that have been translated into more than 25 languages. He has won major literary prizes in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Portugal, Brazil, Italy and the United States. In 2013 Couto was awarded the Camões Prize, given to a Portuguese-language writer for his life’s work. In 2014 he received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, dubbed “the American Nobel.” In 2015 he was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize for The Tuner of Silences, published by Bibloasis, also long-listed for the 2015 Dublin IMPAC Award. Biblioasis also published his selected essays, Pensativities: Essays & Provocations (2015). Couto’s novel Confession of the Lioness was shortlisted for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award. Mia Couto lives with his family in Maputo, Mozambique, where he works as an environmental consultant.
Eric M. B. Becker is editor of Words without Borders and translator of numerous writers from the Portuguese. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the PEN American Center, the Fulbright Commission and, most recently, from the National Endowment for the Arts for his translation of the short stories of Lygia Fagundes Telles.
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