"In any skin purple is a heavy tone that penetrates to the core." paulo da costa's stories get under your skin, bruise your consciousness with their exploration of the forces that hold us together, not always benignly, and those that pull us apart. A hunter and cougar ponder the positions of predator and prey under the dense canopy of a West Coast forest. A nine-year-old girl tells her stuffed rabbit, Carrot, that it's not as easy to run away as she thought, especially when she suspects someone is following her. Like the bubbles that the character in the title story blows while witnessing the dissolution of a love affair, these stories dazzle and beguile: with their craft, their often dark humour, their grasp of people living the extremity that is daily life.

Born in Angola and raised in Portugal, paulo da costa is a writer, editor and translator living in Victoria, BC. His first book of fiction, The Scent of a Lie, received the 2003 Commonwealth First Book Prize for the Canada-Caribbean Region and the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize. His poetry and fiction have been published in literary magazines around the world and have been translated to Italian, Mandarin, Spanish, Serbian, Slovenian and Portuguese. His latest book of fiction, The Green and Purple Skin of the World, was released by Broadview Press / Freehand Books in 2013.

paulo da costa's profile page

"da costa's stories unfold with the ease and inevitability of myth."

Weyman Chan