Letter to Pessoa by Michelle Cahill Online

Letter to Pessoa
Title : Letter to Pessoa
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 9781925336146
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 247

Letter to Pessoa is the first collection of short stories by Indian-Australian poet Michelle Cahill. It is an imaginative tour de force, portraying a range of complex characters in social and political settings across the world, from Seville to Nairobi, Boston to Chiang Mai, Kathmandu to Kraków. Like the poet Fernando Pessoa, who gives the collection its title, and who creLetter to Pessoa is the first collection of short stories by Indian-Australian poet Michelle Cahill. It is an imaginative tour de force, portraying a range of complex characters in social and political settings across the world, from Seville to Nairobi, Boston to Chiang Mai, Kathmandu to Kraków. Like the poet Fernando Pessoa, who gives the collection its title, and who created as many as seventy versions of himself, Cahill displays a remarkable inventiveness in the creation of perspectives and identities, making distant landscapes and situations come alive, as they express the fear and longing, obsession and outrage, of the people caught up in them. Displaying its awareness of the power of writing to create realities, the collection includes stories in letter form to Jacques Derrida, Virginia Woolf, Jean Genet, and to JM Coetzee, from his character Melanie Isaacs.

Letter to Pessoa Reviews

  • Magdalena

    It’s possible to read Letter to Pessoa as a series of journeys: in time, in space, inward and outward. The twenty four pieces that make up the book weave together, linking character, location, and blurring boundaries between the narratives, genre, gender, past and present, story-time and discourse-time, life and death, and between the real and the imagined. Each of the pieces draws from and builds on the others in subtle ways. The stories are interspersed by the literary letters, including the [...]

  • Tonymess

    A collection for readers, playful, insightful & manipulative, these "short stories" use influences from Pessoa, Borges, Coetzee, Woolf & Rózewicz (to name a few), blending memory, modern day settings with style & tone and imaginings from the pens of the recipients of these "letters".By far one of the most talented Australian writers going around, thank goodness as this quality is few and far between.Thanks Giramondo Publishing for being bold enough to bring this into the world.

  • Michael Livingston

    I feel like I'm not well read or literary enough for this book - the letters to literary figures that made up a third of the book mostly passed me by. The stories, while finely observed and beautifully written, felt like fragments - without plot or closure and only occasionally were the moments sharp enough to really hit home for me. Cahill is a gorgeous writer, but I always felt like this book was holding me at a distance.

  • Bill Brydon

    "Almost reluctantly, she replayed the video. She wondered if the neighbours could hear her soft, strangled breath escaping from her throat What a trivial sound it was! And yet, how well it heightened the exquisite pause of the moment – to hold her breath! He likes the selfie of her skimpily-dressed winter body which she posted on Tumblr. She knows that he reads everything she writes on her blog with the hunger of a hunter. That’s how she is scorned, tripped, and how he is justified so he can [...]