"Set in Lisbon as Portugal's African colonies dissolve in the 1970s."--Jacket.

Recounts the anguished tale of a Portuguese medic haunted by memories of war, who, like the Ancient Mariner, will tell his tale to anyone who listens. In the tradition of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, Lobo Antunes weaves words into an exhilarating tapestry, imbuing his prose with the grace and resonance of poetry. The narrator, freshly returned to Lisbon after his hellish tour of duty in Angola, confesses the traumas of his memory to a nameless lover. Their evening unfolds like a fever dream, as Lobo Antunes leaps deftly back and forth from descriptions of postdictatorship Portugal to the bizarre and brutal world of life on the front line. The result is both tragic and absurd, and belongs among the great war novels of the modern age.

"He [the author] draws us into a labyrinth of disparate lives whose connections become clear only gradually ... a diabetic teenage girl in Lisbon, her father, an officer in the pre-revolutionary armey and a secret policeman."--Jacket.

Rui S., a political historian, is unable to accept the circumstances of his life: his mother's death from cancer, his estrangement from his family, his rejection by his first wife and children, his political vacillations and his ambigious feelings for his second wife.

Cogs, Caravels and Galleons traces the development of seagoing vessels from the traditions of late antiquity to the all important emergence of the three-masted ship, undoubtedly the most significant innovation in the history of shipping before the steam engine. Without the three-masted ship the European age of exploration and expansion is almost inconceivable and there is no doubt that the subsequent evolution of the world would have been markedly different. In recent years much original research has been done in this field, based on both documentary sources and archaeology, but this is the first overall synthesis of the new material now available. The main chapters are devoted to the principal ship types, explaining the latest thinking on the characteristics of cogs, caravels, hulks and so forth that have caused scholarly debate for decades. There are also more general sections on essential background subjects like construction and guns and gunnery, as well as pertinent essays on the evidence - from documentary sources, contemporary illustrations and archaeology. All the contributors are the foremost experts in their fields, but in presenting the fruits of their research at an approachable level, Cogs, Caravels and Galleons is a pioneering work in this area of maritime history.

This book draws an updated Euro-American conceptual map, starting from a limited number of strategic terms whose meanings today are judged univocal and permanent, while in fact daily use has turned them into “common sense”, depriving them of their ambiguity – an original feature of language, particularly relevant when it comes to literary use. By re-examining the proper noun for each of the selected notions, the contributors’ common intent is to shed light on their polysemous nature and linguistic fluidity, in spite of the common tendency towards simplification and homogeneity imposed by hegemonic cultural paradigms. Along this line, the book explores the great divides between identity and otherness (or common or alien) in order to recover a sense of cultural identity which is at once polymorphous and polyphonic.

On the tenth anniversary of the return of their battalion from Mozambique, five men attempt to rekindle the fraternal bond that helped them survive the colonial war that was Portugal's Vietnam. In turn, they tell the stories of their lives before, during, and after the revolution that overthrew the long-lived Salazar dictatorship.

The narrator of this stark and elegantly translated novel is a psychiatrist named Antnio Lobo Antunes, returning from vacation to his loathed job at Miguel Bombarda Hospital in Lisbon. Over the course of the trip, the narrator's mind ranges over the monstrosities he encountered in the colonial wars in Angola in the 1970s and in his work; through the layering of memories, he draws parallels between the destruction of the war and the questionable care offered to the mentally ill.

Concerned with giving voice to Cape Verdean life, Fortes writes in Cape Verdean Creole - and not just standard Portuguese - a powerful statement reinforcing the islands' distinctive African nature. However, his poems are often written from the perspective of an exile - and themes of exile and redemptive return recur in his work. This collection introduces English readers to Fortes, and the poet's beautiful and unique use of language.

A soaring, symphonic epic by the Portuguese master novelist, considered to be the "heir to Conrad and Faulkner" (George Steiner). The razor-thin line between reality and madness is transgressed in this Faulknerian masterpiece, António Lobo Antunes's first novel to appear in English in five years. What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire?, set in the steamy world of Lisbon's demimonde—a nightclub milieu of scorching intensity and kaleidoscopic beauty, a baleful planet populated by drag queens, clowns, and drug addicts—is narrated by Paolo, the son of Lisbon's most legendary transvestite, who searches for his own identity as he recalls the harrowing death of his father, Carlos; the life of Carlos's lover, Rui, a heroin addict and suicide; as well as the other denizens of this hallucinatory world. Psychologically penetrating, pregnant with literary symbolism, and deeply sympathetic in its depiction of society's dregs, Lobo Antunes's novel ventriloquizes the voices of the damned in a poetic masterwork that recalls Joyce's Ulysses with a dizzying farrago of urban images few readers will forget.