Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Fado and Other Stories

Fado and Other Stories

Vaz, Katherine

Paperback

Series: Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Book 67

General Fiction

Publisher Price: $29.00

ISBN10: 0822962527
ISBN13: 9780822962526
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: Oct 15 1997
Pages: 168
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.42 Width: 5.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
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: \u201cIn 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.\u201d

Vaz's beautiful, intensely conscious language often delicately slips her stories into the realm of the fado, the Portuguese song about fate and longing. \u201cListen for the nightingale that presses its breast against the thorns of the rose, \u201d on character sings, \u201cthat the song might be more beautiful.\u201d 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.

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