Search results for ""Author Margaret Jull Costa""

A profound and genre-defying work of literature about love, death, and illness from one of Portugal’s most celebrated writers “One of the essential writers of our tormented times.”—Alberto Manguel, Times Literary Supplement “Little prepares one for this extraordinary book, in which each chapter, covering a single day, and lasting a single sentence, offers a teeming stream of consciousness. . . . Even pain is alive, and alive is the word for this book, alive and enduring.”— Michael Autrey, Booklist Incapacitated after the removal of a malignant tumor, the narrator, António, spends his days in a Lisbon hospital enduring the humiliations of severe illness. As he drifts in and out of consciousness, he revisits fragments of his life and the people who passed through it. He recalls the village where he lived as a child near the Mondego River amid the eucalyptus and pines, his parents and grandparents and their tight-knit community of potato farmers and tungsten miners, and the woman he loved—an unexpected polyphony of voices and places sounding in sharp counterpoint to debilitating pain. By the Rivers of Babylon conjures the past and the present all at once, revealing the power of memory to embolden us in the face of extraordinary suffering. This is António Lobo Antunes’s homage to the beauty of a cherished life in its confrontation with imminent death.

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The clue to a murder in the art world of contemporary Madrid lies hidden in a medieval painting of a game of chess.In a 15th-century Flemish painting two noblemen are pictured playing chess. Yet two years before he could sit for the portrait, one of them was murdered. In 20th-century Madrid, Julia, a picture restorer preparing the painting for auction, uncovers a hidden inscription in Latin that points to the crime: Quis necavit equitem? Who killed the knight? But as she teams up with a brilliant chess theoretician to retrace the moves, she discovers the deadly game is not yet over.

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With the grand sweep of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, this enduring tale transports us to a picturesque seaside town haunted by its colonial past. Considered one of Europe’s most influential contemporary writers, Portuguese novelist Lídia Jorge has captivated international audiences for decades. With the publication of The Wind Whistling in the Cranes, English-speaking readers can now experience the thrum of her signature poetic style and her delicately braided multi-character plotlines and witness the heroic journey of one of the most maddening, and endearing, characters in literary fiction. Exquisitely translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Annie McDermott, this breathtaking saga, set in the now-distant 1990s, tells the story of the landlords and tenants of a derelict canning factory in southern Portugal. The wealthy, always-scheming Leandros have owned the building since before the Carnation Revolution. It was Leandro matriarch, Dona Regina, who handed the keys to the Matas, the bustling family from Cape Verde who saw past the dusty machinery and converted the space into a warm—and welcoming—home. When Dona Regina is found dead outside the factory on a holiday weekend, her body covered in black ants, her granddaughter, Milene, investigates. Aware that her aunts and uncles, who are on holiday, will berate her inability to articulate what has just happened, she approaches the factory riddled with anxiety. Hours later, the Matas return home to find this strange girl hiding behind their clotheslines and with caution, they take her in. Days later, the Leandros realise that Milene has become hopelessly entangled with their tenants, and their fear of political and financial ruin sets off a series of events that threatens to uproot the lives of everyone involved. Narrated with passionate, incandescent prose, The Wind Whistling in the Cranes establishes Lídia Jorge as a novelist of extraordinary international resonance.

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Sitting at his desk, Bernardo Soares imagined himself free forever of Rua dos Douradores, of his boss Vasques, of Moreira the book-keeper, of all the other employees, the errand boy, the post boy, even the cat. But if he left them all tomorrow and discarded the suit of clothes he wears, what else would he do? Because he would have to do something. And what suit would he wear? Because he would have to wear another suit. A self-deprecating reflection on the sheer distance between the loftiness of his feelings and the humdrum reality of his life, The Book of Disquiet is a classic of existentialist literature.

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"A brilliantly inventive writer" A.S. BYATT"The most important Basque writer of his generation" Times Literary Supplement"Not just a Basque novelist but the Basque novelist" GuardianTheir lives run into each other, like water running over stonesAs the Basque mining town of Ugarte moves from the hazy summer of the 1972 Olympics, through the mining strikes of the turbulent Eighties and into the modern day, her people navigate the silences, secrets, joys and tragedies of their lives.From the story of a traumatised teenage boy at the town's bakery, to the tale of a group of comrades on an army base in the twilight of Franco's dictatorship, the interconnected narratives of Water Over Stones confront the changes time brings to Ugarte's close-knit community, as the lives of its inhabitants run into to each other like water running between stones.This extraordinary novel of friendship, nature, love and the immensity of death shows Bernardo Atxaga's mastery of his craft, and his ability to create places and characters that are impossible to forget.Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead and Margaret Jull-Costa

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"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 Brás 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, Brás 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, Brás Cubas shines a direct light to Ulysses and Love in the Time of Cholera.

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The thought-provoking new novel from the international bestselling author whose words change lives. Linda knows she's lucky. Yet every morning when she opens her eyes to a so-called new day, she feels like closing them again.Her friends recommend medication.But Linda wants to feel more, not less.And so she embarks on an adventure as unexpected as it is daring, and which reawakens a side of her that she - respectable wife, loving mother, ambitious journalist - thought had disappeared.Even she can't predict what will happen next...

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"So..." Shola wagged her tail doubtfully, "if I'm a lion, why does Grogóinsist on calling me a mere mutt?" Shola is sure that her noble nature and ambitions of grandeur mean only one thing - that she is, in fact, not a dog but a lioness. To the bemusement of her long-suffering owner, Señor Grogó, she sets off to prove her heroic status to the world (and to herself). If only those pesky ducks, nonchalant cats and tempting snacks weren't there to stand in her way... The Adventures of Shola was an Independent Children's Book of the Year 'Fabulous... will make you laugh your socks off' Guardian Children's Books 'Shola is a charming, short creature stuffed with charisma and fierce ideas, and so is the book about her' Bookbag

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The Book of Disquiet is the Portuguese modernist master Fernando Pessoa’s greatest literary achievement. An “autobiography” or “diary” containing exquisite melancholy observations, aphorisms, and ruminations, this classic work grapples with all the eternal questions. Now, for the first time the texts are presented chronologically, in a complete English edition by master translator Margaret Jull Costa. Most of the texts in The Book of Disquiet are written under the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper. This existential masterpiece was first published in Portuguese in 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death. A monumental literary event, this exciting, new, complete edition spans Fernando Pessoa’s entire writing life.

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"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 Brás 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, Brás 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, Brás Cubas shines a direct light to Ulysses and Love in the Time of Cholera.

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Acclaimed as “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America” by Susan Sontag, as well as “another Kafka” by Allen Ginsberg, Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was famous in his time for his psychologically probing tales of fin-de-siecle Rio de Janeiro. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, “the accomplished duo” (The Wall Street Journal) behind the “landmark...heroically translated” volume (The New Yorker) of The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis (ISBN 978 0 87140 496 1), include twenty-six chronologically ordered stories, Machado de Assis affirms Machado’s status as a literary giant who must finally be fully integrated into the world literary canon.

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