Margaret Jull Costa

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Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream

Margaret Jull Costa; Javier Marias

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Margaret Jull Costa; Paulo Coehlo

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The Double

Margaret Jull Costa; Jose Saramago

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Other editions: Hardcover - 2004

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The Mystery Of The Yellow Room

Margaret Jull Costa; Gaston Leroux

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Other editions: Hardcover - 2004

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Eleven Minutes

Margaret Jull Costa; Paulo Coelho

A new, international bestseller by the author of The Alchemist tells the story of Maria, a young girl from a Brazilian village, whose first innocent brushes with love leave her heartbroken. At a tender age, she becomes convinced that she will never find true love, instead believing that "Love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer ..." A chance meeting in Rio takes her to Geneva, where she dreams of finding fame and fortune. Instead, she ends up working as a prostitute.

In Geneva, Maria drifts further and further away from love as she develops a fascination with sex. Eventually, Maria's despairing view of love is put to the test when she meets a handsome young painter. In this odyssey of self-discovery, Maria has to choose between pursuing a path of darkness, sexual pleasure for its own sake, or risking everything to find her own "inner light" and the possibility of sacred sex, sex in the context of love.

In this gripping and daring new novel, Paulo Coelho sensitively explores the sacred nature of sex and love and invites us to confront our own prejudices and demons and embrace our own "inner light."

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The Yellow Rain

Margaret Jull Costa; Julio Llamazares

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Other editions: 2003

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Warrior of the Light: A Manual

Margaret Jull Costa; Paulo Coelho

Warrior of the Light: A Manual is an inspirational companion to The Alchemist, an international bestseller that has beguiled millions of readers around the world. Every short passage invites us to live out our dreams, to embrace the uncertainty of life, and to rise to our own unique destiny. In his inimitable style, Paulo Coelho helps bring out the Warrior of the Light within each of us. He also shows readers how to embark upon the way of the Warrior: the one who appreciates the miracle of being alive, the one who accepts failure, and the one whose quest leads him to become the person he wants to be.

Paulo Coelho is one of the most beloved storytellers of our time. Now, in the long-awaited companion to his first novel, Coelho presents a collection of philosophical stories that will delight and guide seekers everywhere.

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The Crime of Father Amaro: Scenes from the Religious Life

Margaret Jull Costa; Jose Maria Eca De Queiros

An unflinching portrait of a priest who seduces his landlady's daughter, now an acclaimed and controversial motion picture
Eça de Queirós's novel, The Crime of Father Amaro is a lurid satire of clerical corruption in a town in Portugal (Leira) during the period before and after the 1871 Paris Commune. At the start, a priest physically explodes after a fish supper while guests at a birthday celebration are "wildly dancing a polka." Young Father Amaro (whose name means "bitter" in Portuguese) arrives in Leira and soon lusts after—and is lusted after by—budding Amélia, dewy-lipped, devout daughter of São Joaneira who has taken in Father Amaro as a lodger. What ensues is a secret love affair amidst a host of compelling minor characters: Canon Dias, glutton and São Joaneira's lover; Dona Maria da Assunção, a wealthy widow with a roomful of religious images, agog at any hint of sex; João Eduardo, repressed atheist, free-thinker and suitor to Amélia; Father Brito, "the strongest and most stupid priest in the diocese;" the administrator of the municipal council who spies at a neighbor's wife through binoculars for hours every day. Eça's incisive critique flies like a shattering mirror, jabbing everything from the hypocrisy of a rich and powerful Church, to the provincialism of men and women in Portuguese society of the time, to the ineptness of politics or science as antidotes to the town's ills. What lurks within Eça's narrative is a religion of tolerance, wisdom, and equality nearly forgotten. Margaret Jull Costa has rendered an exquisite translation and provides an informative introduction to a story that truly spans all ages.

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The Man of Feeling

Margaret Jull Costa; Javier Marias

A gem of a novel about an affair between a married woman and a younger man.
Glinting like a moonstone with layers of emotion, The Man of Feeling is a sleek and strange tale of cosmopolitan love. An affair between a married woman and a young man just becoming an opera star (curiously helped along by the husband's factotum) meets with adamant resistance from the implacable husband.
Narrated by the young opera singer, the novel opens as he recalls traveling on a train from Milan to Venice, silently absorbed for hours by the woman asleep opposite his seat. In the measured tones of memory, The Man of Feeling revolves on the poles of anticipation and recollection. The peculiar rarified life lived in the world's luxury hotels, a life of rehearsal and performance, the constant travel and ghost-like detachment of our protagonist adds a deeper tone to the novel's weave of desire and detachment, of consideration and reconsideration: its epigraph cites William Hazlitt: "I think myself into love,/And I dream myself out of it." As Marías remarks in a brief afterword, this is a love story "in which love is neither seen nor experienced, but announced and remembered." Can love be recalled truly when it no longer exists? That twist will continue to revolve in the reader's mind, conjuring up in its disembodied way Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Beautifully translated into English for the first time by Margaret Jull Costa, this fascinating and eerie early novel by Javier Marías bears out his reputation for the "dazzling" (TLS) and "startling" (The New York Times).

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The Others

Margaret Jull Costa; Javier Garcia Sanchez

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Hunting the Last Wild Man

Margaret Jull Costa; Angela Vallvey

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Club of Angels

Margaret Jull Costa; Luis Fernando Verissimo

A witty novel about sin and gluttony, by one of Brazil's most revered writers. Luis Fernando Verissimo's The Club of Angels is an irresistible, enticing book—almost as irresistible and enticing as the exquisite meals prepared within—about the sin of gluttony. Written by one of Brazil's leading authors and columnists, The Club of Angels was an immediate success there, and has been on the bestseller list since 1998. It tells the story of ten privileged men, who meet every month to dine fabulously and celebrate their friendship and singularity. When their leader, Ramos, dies of AIDS, the narrator Daniel meets his possible replacement—Lucido—in a wineshop. Lucido is mysteriously taciturn, but in the privacy of Daniel's kitchen, he recreates the men's favorite dishes, giving them a gastronomic experience like no other. The tale of bewilderment and death that follows creates an unforgettable literary experience. It is tinged with funny characters, witty dialogue, touching with mordant satire on all segments of Brazilian society. The Club of Angels has been translated into English by the renowned Margaret Jull Costa (translator of José Saramago, Paulo Coelho, Javier Marías, and Arturo Perez-Reverte).

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The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhi

Margaret Jull Costa; Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio; Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio

AlfanhuGi, an apprentice to a taxidermist, carries out extraordinary experiments and travels around Castile in search of knowledge.

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The Painter of Birds

Margaret Jull Costa; Lidia Jorge

The story of a daughter's longing for her absent father and her determination to piece together the past and the future The setting of this extraordinary novel is an old farmhouse in Portugal-a house far enough from the Atlantic not to hear the breaking waves during a storm but near enough for the walls to be corroded by the salt in the air. With most members of her large family having left the hardship of life in this landscape of sand and stone for jobs in faraway places, a young woman struggles to piece together her past from the widely varying stories she's been told. Left behind by a free-spirited, feckless father, a seducer with a rare gift for drawing, she is raised by her uncle who has married her mother. The only memories of her father's two brief visits are the echoes of his footsteps on the stairs leading to her room. The only signs of him are letters from the widest reaches of the world-letters accompanied by brilliantly colored drawings of exotic birds. The daughter longs for her father and, as she grows up, she is determined to find him and uncover the truth. Brimming with astute and exquisite characterizations, this strikingly lyrical novel evokes the atmosphere of rural Portugal in a changing world and explores the timeless themes of family, independence, and the often painful experience of emigration.

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Margaret Jull Costa; Jose Saramago

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Fencing Master

Margaret Jull Costa; Arturo Perez-Reverte; Sonia Soto

Everyone in Madrid in the torrid fall of 1868 is discussing political plots and revolution except for Don Jaime. He is a fencing master and a man of honor, an anachronism. For years he has been working on a Treatise on the Art of Fencing, the heart of which is his perfection of the unstoppable thrust. He is approached one day by a beautiful and mysterious woman with a scar at the corner of her mouth that hints at dark violence. She asks the maestro to teach her the unstoppable thrust. Even though Doýa Adela de Otero's weapons of charm and elegance are formidable, Don Jaime declines. But he is entirely unprepared for the unhurried, sure, and inexplicable movements that follow. Soon he finds himself involved in a plot that includes seduction, politics, secret documents, and murder.Rich with the historical detail of a decaying world that agonizes-as does the art of fencing-over ideals of honor and chivalry, The Fencing Master is superb literature and an honest-to-goodness page-turner.

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Other editions: Softcover - 2000

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When I Was Mortal

Margaret Jull Costa; Javier Marias

Victims of mistaken identity, amateur sleuths, professionals liars, eavesdroppers, assassins, and failed bodyguards populate these remarkable tales. Plots turn on curious exigencies--a woman about to star in her first porn film; a night doctor who adds new meaning to "specialist"; a neglectful ghost.

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A Heart So White

Margaret Jull Costa; Javier Marias

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All Souls

Margaret Jull Costa; Javier Marias

With high black humor, a visiting Spanish lecturer bends his gaze over that most British of institutions, Oxford University. In All Souls, our narrator, a visiting Spanish lecturer, viewing Oxford through a prismatic detachment, is alternately amused, puzzled, delighted, and disgusted by its vagaries of human vanity. A bit lonely, not always able to see his charming but very married mistress, he casts about for activity; he barely has to teach. His stay of two years, he recalls, involved duties which "were practically nil" -- "Oxford is, without a doubt, one of the cities in the world where least work gets done, where simply being is far more important than doing or even acting." Yet so much goes into that simply being: friendship, opinion-mongering, one-upmanship, finicky exchanges of favors, gossip, adultery, book-collecting, back-patting, back-stabbing. Marias has a sweet tooth for eccentricity, and his novel "crackles with deliciously sly observations of Oxford mores," as James Woodall noted in the Independent. And yet further, All Souls is a story of love within "a mysterious narrative," as The New Statesman noted, within "a turmoil of choreographical stories."

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Veronika Decides to Die

Margaret Jull Costa; Paulo Coelho

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The Tale of the Unknown Island

Margaret Jull Costa; Jose Saramago

"A man went to knock at the king's door and said, Give me a boat. The king's house had many other doors, but this was the door for petitions. Since the king spent all his time sitting at the door for favors (favors being offered to the king, you understand), whenever he heard someone knocking at the door for petitions, he would pretend not to hear..."
Why the petitioner required a boat, where he was bound for, and who volunteered to crew for him the reader will discover as this narrative unfolds. And at the end it will be clear that if we thought we were wrong. We have been reading a love story, a philosophical tale worthy of Voltaire or Swift.

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Flame-Coloured Dress and Other Stories

Margaret Jull Costa; Jose Regio

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The Lone Woman

Margaret Jull Costa; Bernardo Atxaga

Thirty-seven-year-old Irene is just out of prison after a four-year sentence for terrorist involvement. On her first night of freedom, she wanders from bar to bar, picks up a stranger, and spends the night with him in a hotel. He treats her badly; she attacks him and escapes. She decides to return to her native Bilbao, and while waiting at the bus stop in Barcelona, she is approached by a man she believes to be a plainclothes policeman. By attaching herself to two nuns, she manages to board the bus without him, and her journey begins. Other passengers on the bus include another plainclothes policeman, who is joined by the first farther down the line. Conversations strike up, and there begins an intricate game of hide-and-seek between strangers as they open up a little, make advances and diversions, and sidestep nimbly. As the bus continues across Spain and the travelers come increasingly into focus, Bernardo Atxaga builds up tensions that can be resolved only after their arrival in Bilbao.

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Other editions: Softcover - 1999

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Symmetries: Stories

Margaret Jull Costa; Luisa Valenzuela

Short, sometimes very short, stories that capture the absurd. Valenzuela's view of life in Latin America works because we know how far it is from reality -- cops in Buenos Aires are not afraid of dogs and Latin lovers do make moves in the game of life. In the tradition of Calvino and Cortazar, the stories in Symmetries are also subtle parables on the art of fiction -- they engage our heads as much as our hearts.

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Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

Margaret Jull Costa; Javier Marias

Published throughout Europe to widespread acclaim, TOMORROW IN THE BATTLE THINK OF ME is a masterfully crafted mystery, a subtle and complex novel of a man trapped by a terrible secret.Marta invites Victor, whom she had met only a few days before, to dinner at her Madrid apartment while her husband is away on business. After Marta's two-year-old son finally falls asleep, the two retreat to the bedroom. As they start to undress, Marta is taken violently ill. Inexplicably, she dies.What is Victor, a stranger in a apartment, to do? He removes the tape, with its compromising messages, from the answering machine, puts some breakfast food on the kitchen table for the child, and leaves.While Marta's elderly father is disconsolate in the belief that his daughter died alone, the rest of the family is all too aware that someone was sharing her bed that night. Dean, the widower, is determined to find out who it was. All might have remained undiscovered, but Victor cannot endure living with shadows.Marias casts a knowing eye on the secrets that brings couples together and break them apart--the admissions that conceal, the lies that reveal--and the infinite capacity for self-deception in pursuit of love.

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