Mia Couto a Finalist for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize!

Big news at the Bibliomanse this morning. We were thrilled to learn that contemporary Mozambican author Mia Couto, whose novel Tuner of Silences we published in 2013, and whose Pensativities: Selected Essays we have forthcoming this spring, has just been named a finalist for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize.

The ten finalists for the prestigious biennial prize were announced this morning, a list that includes such luminaries as César Aira , Amitav Ghosh, Fanny Howe, and László Krasznahorkai. The authors come from ten countries with six new nationalities included on the list for the first time. They are from Libya, Mozambique, Guadeloupe, Hungary, South Africa and Congo.

The sixth Man Booker International Prize, which is worth £60,000, recognizes one writer for his or her achievement in fiction.

The 2015 Man Booker International Prize winner will be announced at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on 19 May.

Congratulations to Mia Couto and his English translator David Brookshaw! 

What Africa Does the African Writer Write About?

Demands are made of an African writer that are not made of a European or American writer.  Insistence is made on proof of authenticity. Questions are asked about the degree to which it is ethnically genuine. No one questions whether José Saramago represents Portuguese culture. It's irrelevant to know whether James Joyce corresponds to the cultural standards of this or that European ethnic group. Why should African writers have to show such cultural passports? This happens  because people persist in thinking of the production of these African writers as belonging to the domain of anthropology or ethnography. What they are producing isn't literature but a transgression of what is accepted as traditionally African.

The writer isn't just someone who writes. He’s someone who produces thought, someone capable of pollinating others with feeling and delight.

More than this, the writer challenges the basis of thought itself. He goes further than challenging the limits of political correctness. He subverts the very criteria that define what is correct, he questions the boundaries of reason.

An excerpt from the rousing essay "What Africa Does the African Writer Write About?" by 20 Neustadt Prize-winner Mia Couto, published for the first time in English earlier today on the BITSblog. The piece is also forthcoming in Pensativities: Selected Essays, Couto's first collection of non-fiction in English, forthcoming from Biblioasis in April. 

"Africa's Bracing Chorus": Tuner of Silences in Wall Street Journal

We had a short but sweet nod to Mia Couto in the Fiction Chronicle this weekend in the Wall Street Journal. It was part of a round-up of recent African literature. The WSJ site security is pretty tight, so you won't be able to see it without a subscription, but here's a taster:

"For a long time, when people spoke of contemporary African literature, they were mostly talking about just two countries. South Africa, of course, with its canonical authors like J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. And Nigeria, whose prolific literary scene grew from the pioneering work of Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. 

"But in recent years English readers have been bombarded by voices from all over the continent, bracingly enlarging our popular conception of Africa. Just recently we had both the redemptive, made-for-TV-movie fare of Ishmael Beah's Radiance of Tomorrow, about post-civil-war Sierra Leone, and the subtle and elegant metaphysics of Mia Couto's The Tuner of Silences, unpacking the legacy of Mozambique's wars for independence. Last year NoViolet Bulawayo's jagged and fragmentary We Need New Names gave an impressionistic glimpse of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, and Taiye Selasi's Ghana Must Go—one of the best books of 2013—was an ebullient drama of emigration and birthright."

You might also want to keep your eyes peeled this Friday, when The Tuner of Silences goes head to head with The Good Lord Bird in The Morning News's Tournament of Books. Fingers crossed!

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Mia Couto to Engage in Cockfight; LA Times Tells All

"The rooster is back, and the rooster is famished," begins a press release issued today by The Morning News. 

2014 marks the tenth anniversary of The Morning News's cocky and off-kilter NCAA-style Tournament of Books, reports the LA Times. This year Mia Couto's The Tuner of Silences has been named one of 14 contenders. 

For anyone unfamiliar with the ToB (or college basketball, for that matter), well, here’s the 411: a panel of judges (including musician John Darnielle, writers John Green, Mat Johnson, Roxane Gay, Jami Attenberg, Hector Tobar, Lydia Kiesling, Jeff Martin, John McElwee, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Schulman, Jane Hu, Roger D. Hodge, John Freeman, publisher Lizzie Skurnick and Tumblr's Rachel Fershleiser) will each be assigned pairs of titles, one of which will ‘advance’ to the next round, until a winner (i.e. “The Rooster” is declared); the process is accompanied by play-by-plays from Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner. 

The competition is pretty stiff, but we DID crow a little to see ourselves already ranked before one of either Kate Atkinson or Fiona Maazel, both of whom have been relegated to a pre-tournament playoff.

Ahem. 

So. Place your bets, folks. May the best bird win. 

The Tournament of Books X Competitors List

"At Night We Walk in Circles" by Daniel Alarcón
"The Luminaries" by Eleanor Catton
"The Tuner of Silences" by Mia Couto
"The Signature of All Things" by Elizabeth Gilbert
"How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" by Mohsin Hamid
"The Dinner" by Herman Koch
"The Lowland" by Jhumpa Lahiri
"Long Division" by Kiese Laymon
"The Good Lord Bird" by James McBride
"Hill William" by Scott McClanahan
"The Son" by Philipp Meyer
"A Tale for the Time Being" by Ruth Ozeki
"Eleanor & Park" by Rainbow Rowell
"The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt
"The People in the Trees" by Hanya Yanagihara
[Winner of the Pre-Tournament Playoff Round]

Pre-Tournament Playoff Round
"Life After Life" by Kate Atkinson
"Woke Up Lonely" by Fiona Maazel

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Last Week Was Actually Pretty Great.

You wouldn't know it from the Thirsty blog (ahemcoughsorry), but last week was actually a pretty great one over here at the Bibliomanse. So a happy Monday to you all! See below for the movings, shakings, news, reviews, and gossipy tidbits that got our follicles tingling ca. Nov. 11 to Nov. 15th, 2013. On the 16th we at the Bibliomanse celebrated ONE FULL YEAR in our wonderful new bookshop and office, and admittedly got a little distracted preparing for that, but you know what? We had a heckuva good time. Paul Vasey, Bob Duff, and Rino Bortolin joined us for author signings, and—as an extra-special geek treat—we had bookbinder extraordinaire Dan Mezza come in from London to do on-the-spot book appraisals and make repairs suggestions on old volumes. Thanks to the book doctor for making the trip south, and thanks to all of our wonderful customers who came in to support us here at the shop. We couldn't do it without you.

On to the media!

1. We had a lovely endorsement of Ray Robertson's David from the Historical Novel Society, as well as a half-hour interview with Ray with Bill Kenower, editor in chief of Author Magazine, on Author2Author;

2. Mauricio Segura's Eucalyptus was reviewed in the Montreal Review of Books and was named an Editor's Pick/Amazon.ca Top 100 Books of the Year for 2013;

3. Lucie Wilk, whose Strength of Bone was also an Editor's Pick/Amazon Top 100 book, was reviewed in this month's Quill & Quire. Quoth Kamal Al-Solaylee: “If you suppose [The Strength of Bone] is a love story across racial and political lines, you’re underestimating the inventiveness and grace of Lucie Wilk’s meditative debut. Wilk instead works with what is unspoken, hinted at, and left to the imagination … anything but typical.”

4. A "Book News" piece by Annalisa Quinn is circulating on NPR.org and NPR affiliates for Mia Couto's Neustadt win:
Book News: Mozambican Writer Wins Neustadt Prize, 'America's Nobel’: on NPR.org’s “The Two-Way,” Nov. 5
Repeated on WWNO.org, Nov. 13

5. In the wake of the furor surrounding Garth Hallberg’s massive Knopf advance, I thought I’d mention that yep, that is in fact the same Garth who blurbed Traymore so handsomely for The Millions. Traymore was also singled out for its first line over the weekend by the San Francisco Chronicle. 

6. Friday was a lovely wonderful rare day for us here at Biblioasis, with our first full-length poetry review in Michael Lista’s “On Poetry” column. For the poetry enthusiasts out there—heck, for everybody—the whole thing’s worth reading in full. Congratulations to Alexandra Oliver.

“An incredible feat of vision and voice … technically, nothing is out of Oliver’s grasp. Her go-to iambic pentameter can swallow anything in its path. Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway should go a long way toward establishing Oliver as one of the country’s best stanza makers, with a fluidity and ambition aspiring to Dylan Thomas or Yeats … When she succeeds, she succeeds entirely.”

7. Last but not least, the following from KD Miller, whose new collection All Saints will be forthcoming with Biblioasis in Spring 2014:

Recently I was interviewed by CNIB volunteer Ann Saunders for Accessible Media Inc. about my experience of recording some of my own books for The Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Included in the interview are excerpts of me narrating Holy Writ (The Porcupine's Quill, 2001); actor Deborah Kipp narrating Brown Dwarf (Biblioasis, 2010); and Ann Saunders herself narrating The Other Voice (Stonebunny Press, 2011.)
If you'd like to listen in, just click on the word "online" at the end of this sentence: "The November 2013 episode of Choice Words, featuring an interview with K.D. Miller, is available for listening online."

Mia Couto Wins $50,000 "American Nobel"

Biblioasis is proud to announce that
MIA COUTO

Author of The Tuner of Silences
is the
winner of the
$50,000
2014 NEUSTADT PRIZE

                                                                                                               

On Friday, Nov. 1, in Norman, Oklahoma, Mozambican novelist Mia Couto was awarded the 2014 Neustadt Prize for Literature. Following just five months after the €100,000 Camões Prize for Literature, which he received in May of 2013, the Neustadt marks the second major lifetime achievement award that Couto has received this year.

The $50,000 prize is sponsored by the University of Oklahoma, the Neustadt family, and World Literature Today (WLT), the university’s award-winning magazine of international literature and culture. Chosen biennially by a jury of seven or more members, the prize, which is the first international award of its scope to originate in America, honours an author for overall literary accomplishment. Because 30 of the Neustadt’s winners, nominees and jurors have also won the Nobel Prize, it has been dubbed “the American Nobel,” and authors associated with both include Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez, Orhan Pamuk, Mo Yan, and Alice Munro.

Gabriella Ghermandi, who nominated Mr. Couto for the Neustadt, has praised him as “an author who addresses not just his country but the entire world, all human beings.” WLT executive director Robert Con Davis-Undiano describes Couto’s project as an attempt “to lift the yoke of colonialism from a culture by reinvigorating its language. A master of Portuguese prose, he wants to lift that burden one word, one sentence, and one narrative at a time, and in this endeavor he has few if any peers.”

Other contenders for this year’s prize included Haruki Murakami, César Aira, and Edward P. Jones.

Couto is the first Mozambican author to receive the Neustadt prize. “Mozambique is a very young country,” Couto commented recently in an interview with PolicyMic: “an African country trying to deny the stereotypes of what is ‘typically’ African, which is normally associated with negative and victimist values.” He observes that the prize announcement comes as happy news in an otherwise sad time for his nation, which once more is confronting the prospect of civil war.

Couto, whose most well-known work is the novel Sleepwalking Land (1992), is the author of over 25 volumes of poetry, fiction, essays, short stories, and plays.

His most recent work to appear in English is The Tuner of Silences (Biblioasis 2013), translated by David Brookshaw.

For more information about Mia Couto and The Tuner of Silences, please read on. You may also listen to a live stage interview, conducted by Eleanor Wachtel of CBC Radio's Writers and Company, as it airs this Sunday June 2nd on CBC Radio One (3 p.m. ET/AT, 3:30 NT, 5 p.m. CT/MT/PT). 

For interviews with Mia Couto or reviews of his work, please visit:

          PolicyMic: A Q&A with Mia Couto

The Paris Review Daily: “We Are Made of Memories”: Mia Couto in Conversation with Scott Esposito

The New Inquiry: “Feinting Spells,” by Aaron Bady

Warscapes: An Excerpt from The Tuner of Silences, Introduced by David Brookshaw

The Coffin Factory: Review

Words Without Borders: Review

Or visit the Biblioasis International Translation Series Website.

PRAISE FOR THE TUNER OF SILENCES

"David Brookshaw's lyrical translation of Mia Couto's Portuguese lull[s] us into a hypnotized semi-acceptance of [an] impossible universe … Couto's narrative tone, at once deadpan and beguiling, and his virtuoso management of time, place him alongside the best Latin American magic realists." —Times Literary Supplement

"A sad novel of poetic brilliance—haunting in its human landscape."— The Independent

"Mia Couto, long regarded as one of the leading writers in Mozambique, has now been recognized as one of the greatest living writers in the Portuguese language … The Tuner of Silences cracks open a welcoming window onto a vast world of literary pleasures that has for too long remained under the radar in the English-speaking world."—Philip Graham, The Millions

ABOUT MIA COUTO

Mia Couto, an environmental biologist from Mozambique, is the author of 25 books of fiction, essays and poems in his native Portuguese. Couto’s novels and short story collections have been translated into 20 languages. Two of his novels have been made into feature films. His work has been awarded important literary prizes in Mozambique, South Africa, Portugal, Italy and Brazil. His books have been bestsellers in Africa, Europe and Latin America. Six of Couto’s books have been translated into English in the United Kingdom: two short story collections by Heinemann and four novels by Serpent’s Tail. The Tuner of Silences is his first novel to be published in North America.

ABOUT BIBLIOASIS

Biblioasis is a literary press based in Windsor, Ontario. Since 2004 we have been publishing the best in Canadian fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and literature in translation. For more information please consult our website: www.biblioasis.com.

Shepherding Sadness: Mia Couto in The Millions

"The Mozambican writer Mia Couto has been having a great year," wrote novelist Philip Graham for The Millions this morning. "Last week, he was nominated for the 23rd Biennial Neustadt International Prize for literature, his fellow nominees including César Aira, Edward P. Jones, and Haruki Murakami. And a mere six weeks before that, Couto won a major international literary award: the Camôes Prize for Literature."

Graham, author of The Moon, Come to Earth and Braided Worlds, then asks the hundred-thousand-euro-question: "Why all this recent success for a writer that you’ve probably never heard of?" Happily the answer isn't complicated: "Couto," he says, "is a master at inverting reality, reversing the order of the world with a swift aphoristic grace that leaves us puzzling over our normal assumptions....long regarded as one of the leading writers in Mozambique, [he] has now been recognized as one of the greatest living writers in the Portuguese language." And  The Tuner of Silences, which as you all know we published in February of this year, "cracks open a welcoming window onto a vast world of literary pleasures that has for too long remained under the radar in the English-speaking world."

Gosh & golly. Happy Wednesday, everybody!

Mia Couto Nominated for $50,000 Neustadt Prize, 2014

Mia Couto Shortlisted for 23rd Biennial Neustadt International Prize for Literature

Nine writers each select a nominee for the $50,000 award

World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma’s award-winning international literature and culture magazine, today announced Mia Couto was among the shortlist of nominees for the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. This announcement comes just 6 weeks after Mia Couto was awarded the 100,000-euro Camões Prize for Literature in recognition of his lifetime achievement.

 The Neustadt Prize, the most prestigious international literary award given in the United States, is often cited as “the American Nobel,” and is chosen solely on the basis of literary merit. Also on this year’s shortlist are César Aira, Duong Thu Huong, Edward P. Jones, Ilya Kaminsky, Chang-rae Lee, Edouard Maunick, Haruki Murakami, and Ghassan Zaqtan. Mia Couto is the first Mozambican author to receive a nomination in the 44-year history of the prize.

In the next stage of the award process, jury members will convene at OU in October for deliberations. The jury will then vote on the shortlist of nominees to select the winner of the prize, who will be announced on Nov. 1 during the Neustadt Festival of International Literature and Culture. The laureate will receive $50,000, a replica of an eagle feather cast in silver, and a certificate of recognition at a ceremony at OU in fall 2014. For more information on the Neustadt Prize and the fall 2013 festival, visit www.neustadtprize.org.

"The boundless resistance of the human imagination": The Independent Reviews Mia Couto

Environmental biologist and Camões Prize-winning
author Mia Couto was featured in today's issue of
The Independent.

There was a spectacular review of Mia Couto's The Tuner of Silences in today's Independent. "Born in Mozambique to Portuguese parents," writes Zoe Norridge, "Couto is one of the lusophone world's most admired writers. Given his commitment to anti-colonial politics, it is tempting to read The Tuner of Silences as allegory: an imaginary world echoing the harsh realities of the Mozambican liberation struggle and subsequent civil war. But it is not a straightforward national critique. Instead, the parameters of the novel are both worldly and intimate. While Couto heads his chapters with poetry from both Latin America and Europe, the resounding focus of the narrative is the family unit. And, above all, the boundless resistance of the human imagination in the face of forgetting and loss."

Couto, of course, recently won the Camões Prize for Portuguese-language literature. He's "often referred to as a magical realist," Norridge continues, "But the mystical remains stubbornly absent from this book. Instead, the other-worldliness of the novel is created entirely by the dreams and delusions of its protagonists. Lovers of African literature may find resonance here between Couto's writing and JM Coetzee's new novel, The Childhood of Jesus. Both turn away from the present to reflect on the ethics of our interactions with others and the parameters of our internal worlds. While Couto's work is ultimately more joyful, The Tuner of Silences remains a sad novel of poetic brilliance – haunting in its human landscape."

Lovely. Just lovely. For the full review please click here.

Mia Couto wins 2013 Camões Prize for Literature

Mia Couto, author of
The Tuner of Silences
and winner of the
2013 Camões Prize.

Last night Mia Couto received the 2013 Camões Prize for Literature, one of the most prestigious international awards honoring the work of Portuguese language writers. The announcement was made in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The prize, awarded annually, was created in 1988 to distinguish writers of the Portuguese language whose work has contributed to the enrichment of the literary and cultural heritage of the Portuguese language. And valued at 100,000 euros, it is one of the richest prizes in the world, comparable to the Nobel.

The awarding jury included writers José Eduardo Agualusa and Joao Paulo Borges Coelho, journalist José Carlos Vasconcelos,  professor Clara Crabbé Rocha, critic Alcir Pécora and Ambassador and member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters Alberto da Costa e Silva.

Congratulations to Mia Couto from all of us at Biblioasis. For more information please visit the Portuguese American Journal.

"We Are Made of Memories": Mia Couto speaks to Scott Esposito in The Paris Review Daily

This just in from The Paris Review's daily blog. Thanks to Scott Esposito for his thoughtful questions.

We Are Made of Memories: A Conversation with Mia Couto

May 2, 2013 | by Scott Esposito

Born in 1955 in Mozambique to Portuguese immigrants, Mia Couto is widely considered one of the foremost wielders of the Portuguese language. He has written over twenty books that have been translated into at least that many languages, and those translated into English since 1990 have garnered him a dedicated Anglophone following. Although Couto’s fiction varies widely, he frequently deals with Mozambique’s civil war, which erupted in 1977, two years after he turned twenty and his nation gained its independence from Portugal. His recurrent use of surreal effects in his work has led many critics to liken his fiction to Latin America’s magical realism, a label at which he bristles.

The Tuner of Silences, brought into English by Couto’s longtime translator David Brookshaw and published this year by Biblioasis, tells the story of Vítalico, a father who has dragged his children to an abandoned Mozambican nature preserve after the horrifying death of his wife. As Couto explores the nature of Vítalico’s regime and its eventual collapse, he delves into frequent obsessions: the construction of identity, and the role that memory and language play in that process.

 Recently, over email, I discussed Tuner, influences, labels, and the curious provenance of Couto’s first name in email correspondence with him.

To read the full interview, go here. Mia Couto will be appearing in New York as part of PEN World Voices' Literary Safari on May 3rd, and in conversation with Anderson Tepper at powerHouse Arena on May 4th. 

One More for Tuner

Two new reviews to report today, one for Tuner of Silences, and another for a book that launched around this time last year: Doug Glover's Attack of the Copula Spiders. "The book has stayed on my mind ever since I read it," wrote Joe Ponepinto of the LA Review in an email to me this weekend, and he's not the first person I've met to feel that way. I'm perpetually amazed by how many people make a point of telling us how much this book has changed their approach to writing. And Joe, bless him,  decided to write about the experience in a (copula-free!) blog post this weekend, where he says: "I reviewed a book a while back that has stayed with me for many months and has affected the way I write and read, and it’s opened my eyes to a weakness in much creative writing, even in published books."

So. There you have it. No small praise. As for Tuner, well, the indefatigable M.A. Orthofer at The Complete Review has rated it and compiled a helpful list of links to previous reviews. You can check it out here, & discover for yourselves why he calls the book "starkly poetic"; "a novel of damaged souls in a damaged country, The Tuner of Silences is an eloquent tale of loss."

Happy Monday, folks! Stay tuned for the latest BiblioNews as we head to Boston this week for AWP. If the gods are kind, there may even be gladiator costumes to report on ... 

"A true tour-de-force of modern African writing"

The high praise keeps rolling in for The Tuner of Silences, with new review published in Words Without Borders by Anderson Tepper of Vanity Fair. "Couto’s language is rich, fertile, and often full of riddles that turn reality, as we know it, on its head," Tepper says: "His stories straddle African and European worlds, and his preoccupations range across issues of race and identity, national culture and legacies of the country’s civil war ... translated into shimmering prose by David Bradshaw, The Tuner of Silences is a true tour-de-force of modern African writing ... Couto’s literary cosmos is unforgettable."

Read the whole thing here. In fact go read the whole issue. Co-presented by the SPAIN arts & culture program, the March WWB examines the work of 12 Spanish prose masters whose work is largely unavailable in English. Fantastic. Fantastíco. Feliz viernes, everybody!

"A Paragon of Contemporary African Literature"

The first review for The Tuner of Silences has just come in from our friends over at The Coffin Factory, and is it ever a hummer. "A phenomenal book," they say, and "a paragon of contemporary African literature":

Mia Couto is Mozambique’s premier writer, unrivaled in the Portuguese language, and, with the novels Sleepwalking Land and The Last Flight of the Flamingo, has achieved international praise for his use of magical realism in tackling the terrors of Mozambique’s colonial and civil wars. The Tuner of Silences is Couto’s masterful turn toward a more subtle and surreal story: an eleven-year-old’s attempt to reconstruct his family’s taboo history in the scarred emotional and geographical landscape of a post-colonial country torn by war, poverty, and disease.

The conclusion? The Tuner of Silences allows readers to experience "some of the most beautiful and moving prose being written today."

... I think they liked it.

Day 7: The Tuner of Silences

Today's February Freebie, we're proud to announce, is by the internationally bestselling Mia Couto of Mozambique. Don't know Mia Couto? Check out this essay on "Africanness" by him in The Guardian, this review of Sleepwalking Land in The New York Times, or the page about The Tuner of Silences on Biblioasis's International Translation Series website. And for those of you new to February Freebies, the explanation is below. A book a day for the whole month of February!

FEBRUARY FREEBIES AT BIBLIOASIS
Back in the good old days (er, okay, back in Victorian England), you might call an excellent book your fireside university. A book was all you needed to toast the soul on an otherwise cold, damp, drizzly, snow-plagued, slush-infested, toe-benumbing February evening. So in that spirit, we say: listen up! Warm your brain-pans! For the month of February, Monday through Fridays, Biblioasis will be offering a special Facebook-only contest.

Here’s how it works: 

1. Like our Facebook page.
2. Keep an eye out for our status updates. Once a day, Biblioasis will post an announcement for that day’s February Freebie.
3. Like that status, and share it on your own feed. That’s all it takes to enter.
4. Each day we’ll select one name from all our entrants and mail them that day’s book, free of charge.

The freebie book will change daily, so if there's one title in particular you're itching for, make sure to check in regularly. Winners will be contacted via Facebook for their mailing addresses, and participants may enter as often as they like. Good luck and stay warm!

Interesting New Books

For a more-exhaustive-than-most, focussed-on-the-international-with-a-penchant-for-the-heady-postmodern-and-complex list of exciting reads for 2013, I'd point you towards Scott Esposito's Interesting New Books list for 2013. Just up on conversationalreading.com. And oh? What's that there in January? Is that Mia Couto? Yessir: The Tuner of Silences is just off the presses and will be trundling across the continent any day now. Keep an eye out for this Important and Gorgeous book in stores near you.