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The Green and Purple Skin of the World (Freehand $21.95)
We are fragile creatures, breakable but repairable. Often at home we experience our first betrayals, or first invisibilities.
paulo da costa's fiction collection, The Green and Purple Skin of the World, consequently looks at what drives families apart and what forces them back together.
"It is often within the home where we first learn how not to care,"; he says, "and to ignore the harm we inflict on others. We carry on later, failing to understand and protect the most vulnerable who will cross our paths, and often, we will abuse our circumstantial power to fulfill personal wants at another being's expense.";
In the collection, a nine-year-old, certain she's adopted, runs away from home and tells her stuffed rabbit, Carrot, that it's not as easy to run away as she thought, especially when she suspects someone is following her. In private life, a man writes one-sided letters to his beloved as their relationship ruptures.
Another man ponders the positions of predator and prey with a cougar in a West Coast forest. A son tries to convince his aging mother to accept a new IKEA table. A passionate soccer fan shares his near-religious fervor with his young boy.
"If we desire effective change in the destructive ways we relate to each other as communities and nations,"; says da costa, "if we desire to change the destructive ways we relate to the larger web of life on the planet and cosmos, we must first understand how we begin to fail each other in the realm of the personal and of family life.";
Quite likely B.C.'s only Angolan-born author, paulo da costa was raised in Vale de Cambra, Portugal and arrived in Canada in 1989. Having won Best First Book, Canada & Caribbean Region of the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2003, the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize in 2002 and the Canongate Prize for Short-Fiction in 2001, da costa moved to B.C. in 2003 and now lives on Vancouver Island. His stories have been translated into Italian, Chinese, Spanish, Serbian, Slovenian and Portuguese.
978-1-55481-139-7
paulo da costa's fiction collection, The Green and Purple Skin of the World, consequently looks at what drives families apart and what forces them back together.
"It is often within the home where we first learn how not to care,"; he says, "and to ignore the harm we inflict on others. We carry on later, failing to understand and protect the most vulnerable who will cross our paths, and often, we will abuse our circumstantial power to fulfill personal wants at another being's expense.";
In the collection, a nine-year-old, certain she's adopted, runs away from home and tells her stuffed rabbit, Carrot, that it's not as easy to run away as she thought, especially when she suspects someone is following her. In private life, a man writes one-sided letters to his beloved as their relationship ruptures.
Another man ponders the positions of predator and prey with a cougar in a West Coast forest. A son tries to convince his aging mother to accept a new IKEA table. A passionate soccer fan shares his near-religious fervor with his young boy.
"If we desire effective change in the destructive ways we relate to each other as communities and nations,"; says da costa, "if we desire to change the destructive ways we relate to the larger web of life on the planet and cosmos, we must first understand how we begin to fail each other in the realm of the personal and of family life.";
Quite likely B.C.'s only Angolan-born author, paulo da costa was raised in Vale de Cambra, Portugal and arrived in Canada in 1989. Having won Best First Book, Canada & Caribbean Region of the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2003, the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize in 2002 and the Canongate Prize for Short-Fiction in 2001, da costa moved to B.C. in 2003 and now lives on Vancouver Island. His stories have been translated into Italian, Chinese, Spanish, Serbian, Slovenian and Portuguese.
978-1-55481-139-7
Submitted on June 3, 2013 in By David.
