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The Blind Fisherman is a compilation of Mia Couto's early short stories - as first presented to the English-speaking world in his two collections Voices Made Night (1990) and Every Man is a Race (1994). Originally written in Portuguese, it was in these collections that Mia Couto first announced himself as a writer of international importance, constructing stories that blended the unique history of Mozambique with a magic realism that was both inspired by and transcendent of the legacy of Portuguese colonialism and the subsequent civil war.
Already well-established in the Lusophone world, Mia Couto is increasingly acknowledged as a major voice in World literature. Winner of the Camões Prize for Literature in 2013, the most prestigious literary prize honouring Lusophone writers, he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014, and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Yet, despite this high profile there are very few full-length critical studiesin English about his writing. Mia Couto is known for his imaginative re-working of Portuguese, making it distinctively Mozambican in character. This book brings together some of the key scholars of his work such as Phillip Rothwell, Luís ...
Mia Couto's first novel, judged one of the twelve best African books of the 20th century
"Mariano, who has lived in the city from an early age, is summoned back to his village to attend his grandfather's funeral. But when he arrives, he discovers two things: firstly, that he has been nominated by his grandfather to take over the running of the family affairs, secondly that his grandfather has not died completely, but is in that frontier space between life and death. In traditional belief, he has died 'badly', and something must happen in order for him to be laid to rest." "Mariano starts to receive letters supposedly written by his grandfather, telling him about the family. Through this strange relationship, he discovers the true secret of his own birth, while also cleansing his grandfather's conscience."--BOOK JACKET.
An NPR Best Book of 2021 New and selected fiction, over half in English for the first time, from the winner of the 2014 Neustadt Prize. Known internationally for his novels, Neustadt Prize-winner Mia Couto first became famous for his short stories. Sea Loves Me includes sixty-four of his best, thirty-six of which appear in English for the first time. Covering the entire arc of Couto's career, this collection displays the Mozambican author's inventiveness, sensitivity, and social range with greater richness than any previous collection—from early stories that reflect the harshness of life under Portuguese colonialism; to magical tales of rural Africa; to contemporary fables of the fluidity of race and gender, environmental disaster, and the clash between the countryside and the city. The title novella, long acclaimed as one of Couto's best works but never before available in English, caps this collection with the lyrical story of a search for a lost father that leads unexpectedly to love.
"Mia Couto has been recognized internationally as one of the most important African authors of our times. His rapidly growing opus shifts fluidly between various modes of writing, mixing historical elements with poetic and autobiographic ones, in often unpredictable and intellectually challenging ways. With each new book, the writer multiplies various original wor(l)ds, creating new challenges for his readers. Each of Couto's texts opens up a rhizomic world which in turn contains (an)other world(s), inviting us to review and adjust our earlier interpretations of his oeuvre as a whole. In The Worlds of Mia Couto a diverse group of literary experts sets out to explore Mia Couto's oeuvre in rel...
Captivating magical realism from a leading African writer.
A dark, poetic mystery about the women of the remote village of Kulumani and the lionesses that hunt them Told through two haunting, interwoven diaries, Mia Couto's Confession of the Lioness reveals the mysterious world of Kulumani, an isolated village in Mozambique whose traditions and beliefs are threatened when ghostlike lionesses begin hunting the women who live there. Mariamar, a woman whose sister was killed in a lioness attack, finds her life thrown into chaos when the outsider Archangel Bullseye, the marksman hired to kill the lionesses, arrives at the request of the village elders. Mariamar's father imprisons her in her home, where she relives painful memories of past abuse and hope...
"On almost every page of this witty magical realist whodunit, we sense Couto's delight on those places where language slips officialdom's asphyxiating grasp."--The New York Times Book Review on The Last Flight of the Flamingo "The most prominent of the younger generation of writers in Portuguese-speaking Africa, Couto passionately and sensitively describes everyday life in poverty-stricken Mozambique."--Guardian (London) "Quite unlike anything else I have read from Africa."--Doris Lessing As the civil war rages in 1980s Mozambique, an old man and a young boy, refugees from the war, seek shelter in a burnt-out bus. Among the effects of a dead passenger, they come across a set of notebooks tha...
'A man's story is always badly told. That's because a person never stops being born. Nobody leads one sole life, we are all multiplied into different and ever-changeable men.' So it is with all the stories in this collection, which never make a definitive judgement on the individual life, but only suggest its possibilities. Set in Mozambique, the stories reflect the legacy of Portuguese colonialism and the tragedy of the subsequent civil war. Mia Couto's first collection, Voices Made Night, was described as 'lyrical', 'magical' and 'compassionate' by the reviewers, who were unanimous in identifying a significant new talent from the continent. This volume confirms that judgement.