Fado and Other Stories Fado and Other Stories

Fado and Other Stories

    • $33.99
    • $33.99

Publisher Description

Winner of the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize 


This collection is filled with narrative and character grounded in the meaning and value the earth gives to human existence. In one story, a woman sleeps with the village priest, trying to gain back the land the church took from her family; in another, relatives in the Azores fight over a plot of land owned by their expatriate American cousin. Even apparently small images are cast in terms of the earth: Milton, one narrator explains, has made apples the object of a misunderstanding by naming them as Eden’s fruit: “In the Bible, no fruit is named in the Garden of Eden - and to this day apples are misunderstood. They were trying to tempt people not into sin but into listening to the earth more closely. . . . their white meal runs wet with the knowledge of the language of the land, but people do not listen.”


Vaz’s beautiful, intensely conscious language often delicately slips her stories into the realm of the fado, the Portuguese song about fate and longing. “Listen for the nightingale that presses its breast against the thorns of the rose,” on character sings, “that the song might be more beautiful.” Such a verse might describe Vaz’s own motive behind her willingness to confront her subject’s ambiguities and her characters’ conflicts - the simultaneous joy and sorrow of some of life’s discoveries, the pain sometimes hidden within passion and pleasure.

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
1997
15 October
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
168
Pages
PUBLISHER
University of Pittsburgh Press
SELLER
University of Pittsburgh Press
SIZE
2.4
MB

More Books Like This

xo Orpheus xo Orpheus
2013
Bloomsbury 35 Bloomsbury 35
2022
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
2010
Black Swan, White Raven Black Swan, White Raven
2014
Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction
2014
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten
2016

More Books by Katherine Vaz

Mariana Mariana
2024
The Heart Is A Drowning Object The Heart Is A Drowning Object
2019