Ana Luísa Amaral: Casa Fernando Pessoa

Ana Luísa Amaral

ANA LUÍSA AMARAL was born in Lisbon, in 1956, and lives in Leça da Palmeira. She has written poetry, plays, children’s books, books of essays and a novel. She has translated poets such as Emily Dickinson, John Updike or William Shakespeare. Her books have been published in several countries, such as the United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain, Italy, France, The Netherlands, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico or the United States. Theatre plays have been based around her poetry and her books for children. She has received various prizes and awards, among them the Premio Correntes d’Escritas/Casino da Póvoa, the Grande Prémio de Poesia APE (Portuguese Association of Writers), the Giuseppe Acerbi Literary Award, the Premio Internazionale Fondazione Roma, or the PEN Prize for Fiction. Her name has twice been put forward for the Premio Reina Sofia. She taught for many years at the University of Porto, from which she received her Ph.D. on Emily Dickinson, and where her academic research centred around Comparative Poetics, Feminist Studies and Queer Theory. She has also coordinated several international projects. She is on the board of the Institute for Comparative Literature Margarida Losa, where she coordinates the research strand “Intersexualities”. She has edited several academic books, such as New Portuguese Letters to the World (Peter Lang, 2015). She currently co-hosts a weekly radio program on national radio on poetry, O som que os versos fazem ao abrir. In 2019, a book of essays on her work, entitled Beauty and Resistance in the Poetry of Ana Luísa Amaral, will be published in the UK (ed. Claire Williams).

What's in a Name

Poetry by Ana Luísa Amaral

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

With the elliptical looping of a butterfly alighting on one’s sleeve, the poems of Ana Luísa Amaral arrive as small hypnotic miracles. Spare and beautiful in a way reminiscent both of Szymborska and of Emily Dickinson (it comes as no surprise that Amaral is the leading Portuguese translator of Dickinson), these poems—in Margaret Jull Costa’s gorgeous English versions—seamlessly interweave the everyday with the dreamlike and ask “What’s in a name?”…
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One of Japan’s greatest twentieth-century writers.

—Publishers Weekly

Muriel’s sparky prose is the best way to start your day. Reading a blast of her prose every morning is a far more restorative way to start a day than a shot of espresso.

—The Telegraph (London)

Witty, exacting, and wholly original. Muriel Spark’s writing is sui generis, her influence unquantifiable. These essays reveal in diamond-cut fragments the things that most amused and most touched her, each facet reflecting some new, surprising aspect of the deep inner workings of her mind.

—Maud Newton

In Howard’s superb translation, Bataille’s style, built around short sentences, achieves a cumulative lyricism that poignantly captures the unfulfilled promise and tragedy of a historic moment …

—Publishers Weekly

Both DiBlasi’s style and her objective distance and comprehension of her chosen subject mark her as a very psychologically driven, very talented writer.

—Publishers Weekly

The arresting stories in this slim collection by Auster … go a long way toward answering the perennial question “Why write?”

—Ana Luísa Amaral, Publishers Weekly

Descartes’ Loneliness, is a summation of his work to date, confronting everything from the big questions to the family history with his genial mix of humor and solemnity.

—Publishers Weekly

These stories have an exquisite, crystalline quality ably captured by Liu’s flawless translation.

—Publishers Weekly

Busch…deserves greater success than he has so far received-though connoisseurs of clean, dynamic American prose already know and admire his work.

—Publishers Weekly

A lovely, imaginative tour de force…

—Publishers Weekly

(These poems) burn through modern America’s absurdities and unrepentant historical revision in a glorious rant against mediocrity, greed, capitalism and boring poetry, with copious riffs on painting and love.

—Publishers Weekly

A Western European man living in Croatia becomes obsessed with an abandoned house in A House in Istria, Swedish novelist Richard Swartz’s surreal, comic romp through Eastern Bloc history. Narrated by the unnamed man’s long-suffering wife, the book follows the couple as they try to figure out who owns the house so that they can buy it. With his wife patiently translating, the man harasses everyone from their neighbor Dmitrij, who cultivates mushrooms, to local lawyer Franjo, to an Italian family in nearby Trieste. As the story unwinds, we learn that the house was occupied by Jews, then fascists, then communists, all of whom are now busy suing for the house.

—Publisher’s Weekly

One of Scandinavia’s most honored poets.

—Publisher’s Weekly

To great dramatic effect, Ohannessian saves the emotional punch of her story for the end, opening with a family idyll and ending with a tragedy… What makes her account, at once tragic and beautiful, stand out is that it has been carefully but unaffectedly sketched by an author who understand that much of life is beyond understanding.

—Publisher’s Weekly

Ana Luisa Amaral’s poems read as intimate conversations between the poet and reader, in either the early hours of morning or the late hours of night, where small, everyday moments quickly spiral into great cultural, historical, and even cosmic significance. Brilliant.

—The Arkansas International

Ana Luísa Amaral insists upon a reflection on art as an intensely human act. Her poetics is inextricably enmeshed with ethics.

—Professor Paulo de Medeiros
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