Maria Judite de Carvalho

A definitive collection of all the late stories of the Portuguese master of the short form, Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated into English for the first time by Margaret Jull Costa. In her usual, incisive prose, Carvalho returns to what really threatens us, not the sea or witchcraft or a lion with watchful eyes, but people and time. She has visions of an empty future of machines and no more art, a vision that looks more and more prophetic. And she tangles with aging, all the regrets over things people wanted but her characters weren't capable of, or didn't want to, give. And How Have You Been? reckons with what it means to be human over a lifetime, the small triumphs that recede into the mist of memory, the losses that stay razor-sharp. And always, Carvalho writes with unexpected candor and without apologies.

After 25 years away, Mateo Silva has returned to sell his childhood home so he can send his longtime girlfriend--whom he now realizes he may have never loved--on a trip to the Acropolis before her cancer kills her. Mateo sells the home to the first bidder: his wealthy neighbor from childhood, whose wife Gra a enchanted Mateo as a young man. It was Gra a's beauty, paired with his father's unfaithfulness, that broke up his family. But the woman he sees now bears little resemblance to the one he remembers, and you can't move forward by revisiting the past. In searing prose, keenly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, the Portuguese master Maria Judite de Carvalho's narrator is at a crossroads, but too paralyzed to change direction in the life that he no longer seems to control.

Take Six is a celebration of six remarkable Portuguese women writers: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Agustina Bessa-Lu s, Maria Judite de Carvalho, H lia Correia, Teolinda Gers o and L dia Jorge. They are all past mistresses of the short story form, and their subject matter ranges from finding one's inner fox to a failed suicide attempt to a grandmother and grandson battling the wind on a beach. Stories and styles are all very different, but what the writers have in common is their ability to take everyday life and look at it afresh, so that even a trip on a ferry or an encounter with a stranger or a child's attempt to please her father become imbued with mystery and humour and sometimes tragedy. Relatively few women writers are translated into English, and this anthology is an attempt to rectify that imbalance and to introduce readers to some truly captivating tales from Portugal.

Under tio års tid har Dora sörjt sin döde make som lämnade henne och dottern totalt arvlösa. Så en kväll avslöjar Doras svärmor en förkrossande hemlighet om deras äktenskap och i ett slag är Doras bild av hennes eget liv slagen i bitar. Hon måste börja leva sitt liv på nytt. Tre generationer av kvinnor - Dora, hennes dotter och svärmor - tvingas navigera i en värld som skapats av frånvarande män som ändå lyckats diktera villkoren för de kvinnor de kallar mor, hustru eller älskarinna. Tomma skåp, Maria Judite de Carvahlos knivskarpa roman från 1966, översätts för första gången till svenska av Örjan Sjögren med ett förord av Karolina Ramqvist. Tomma skåp är en liten poetisk och samtidigt exakt bok om olyckliga omständigheter, som trots sin tunga tematik aldrig känns tyngd av bitterhet eller självförakt.

Long discounted by a literary culture that actively rejected women's writing, Maria Judite de Carvalho's biting and bitterly funny work has since exploded across the world. Collecting the entirety of her short works written between 1959 and 1967, when the Salazar dictatorship and the rigid edicts of the Catholic church reigned, the stories in So Many People, Mariana might as well have been written today. These are tough, unflinching accounts of women trapped by a culture that values them as workers or wives but not as people. And if they do escape their circumstances, they are, more often than not, irrevocably punished by the world. So Many People, Mariana is an introduction to a major international writer at the height of her power. Translated by the renowned Margaret Jull Costa, Carvalho leads readers into the dark of life under patriarchal capitalism, writing "as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy" (New York Review of Books).

"There is no doubting the authenticity of Carvalho's vision and the originality and severity of her voice." --Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of BooksFor ten years Dora has ritualistically mourned her husband's death, a pointless ritual that forced her to rely on support from old friends and acquaintances. Her beloved husband, a "Christ" so principled he rejected any ambition whatsoever as a construct of a corrupt society, succeeded only in leaving Dora and their daughter with nothing. When her mother-in-law reveals a shattering secret about their marriage one night, Dora's narrative of her own life is destroyed. Three generations of women--Dora, her daughter, and mother-in-law--must navigate a world that has been shaped by the blundering men off in the distance, figures barely present who nonetheless define the lives of the women they would call mother, wife, or lover. Narrated through the gritted teeth of an acquaintance, Empty Wardrobes--Maria Judite de Carvalho's cutting 1966 novel, translated from Portuguese for the first time by Margaret Jull Costa and introduced by Kate Zambreno--is a tale of women who are trapped within the quiet devastation of a patriarchal society and preyed upon by the ambient savageries that perch in its every crevice.