João Melo

The Serial Killer / Auto-Retrato

Machado de Assis

Conceição Evaristo

Oswaldo de Camargo

Lima Barreto

Esmeralda Ribeiro

Maria Firmina dos Reis

Luandino Vieira

Cuti

Jorge Arrimar

Andrea Fernandes

Dario de Melo

Fragata de Morais

Olonkó

Tambá Mbotoh

Uri Sissé

Cinco autores de Angola, quatro de Guiné-Bissau e sete escritores do Brasil, entre eles dois de nossos maiores, Machado de Assis e Lima Barreto, estão reunidos na coletânea Contos do mar sem fim, que chega agora às prateleiras. O título remete aos célebres versos de Fernando Pessoa: "O mar sem fim é português". Nas entrelinhas, o convite para deixar a mente percorrer as imagens que fazem parte do cotidiano dos três povos... E, de fato, os 16 contos selecionados têm em comum o idioma e suas particularidades em cada nação no qual é falado. "A rota de navegação escolhida para atravessarmos esse mar imaginário é instigante em todos os sentidos", explica, na orelha, a professora Laura Cavalcanti Padilha. "Não nos podemos esquecer — e os textos, eles próprios, nos impedem — que a África é um múltiplo e só assim pode ser pensada", avança Padilha na apresentação. Dessa concepção fazem parte os modos dos angolanos e guineenses de viver e se organizar social e simbolicamente. Tudo isso sem falar no intercâmbio de experiências entre os países, seja na dor provocada pela guerra, seja na mancha de sangue dos escravos, que tingiu os oceanos no tempo da escravidão e continua a permear as lembranças dos seus descendentes em Angola, Guiné-Bissau ou no Brasil.

Contos do mar sem fim

“Magical, witty and stunning, João Melo’s stories bring to mind the work of Borges and Ishiguro and some ineffable otherness that is his alone. Discovering his work could be the highlight of a literary career”. Elizabeth McKenzie Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review’s editor “Melo’s stories make the banal and everyday dramas of the folk of Luanda extraordinary, and the extraordinary occurrences mundane. Suffused with irony and wit, the messages of these stories contain serious, sometimes tragic underlying truths with which we can all identify. What the Brazilian Machado de Assis did for Rio de Janeiro in the late nineteenth century, João Melo does for his native Luanda in the early twenty-first”. David Brookshaw Emeritus Professor in Luso-Brazilian Studies University of Bristol “Western readers who still assume that African societies haven’t reached modernity would be advised to follow Angolan writer João Melo as he forges his distinctive African postmodernism. These droll, cosmopolitan, self-aware stories, whose narrators are never innocent of the ills of the society they inhabit, shuffle local and universal cultural references in the certain confidence that they are interchangeable”. Stephen Henighan University of Guelph, Ontario Author of The World of After João Melo, born in 1955 in Luanda, Angola, is an author, journalist, and communication consultant. He is a founder of the Angolan Writers Association, and of the Angolan Academy of Literature and Social Sciences. He was professor, advertiser, member of the parliament (1992-2017) and minister (2017-2019). Currently, he lives exclusively from writing, and splits his time between Luanda, Lisbon and Washington, D.C. His works include poetry, novels, articles and essays and have been published in Angola, Portugal, Brazil, Italy, Cuba, Spain and US. A number of his writings had also been translated into French, German, Arabic, and Chinese. Some of his stories and poems translated into English appeared in Words Without Borders, Catamaran Literary Reader, Chicago Quarterly Review, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Olongo Africa, The Shallows Tales Review, Lolwe, A Gathering Together, Iskanchi, Gávea-Brown and Brittle Paper. He was awarded the 2009 Angola Arts and Culture National Prize in literature category.

And Suddenly the Flowers Withered and Other Stories

João Melo

Books

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