The Midwife of Torment and Other Stories is a collection of sudden fiction that compresses its narrative to deliver a variety of stories that alternate the flavour of a philosophical reflection with the whimsical enchantment of a fable with a twist. These stories also often dwell on the strange--and the horror--found in our mundane lives. Stories that, on occasion, also leap as far as speculative fiction or swirl in a lyrical exploration of prose narratives. Divided into six sections, Midwife explores human and non-human voices through narrative weighing at less than one thousand words, and the vast majority weighing at less than five hundred. Included are a series of black and white lithograph-like original drawings commissioned specifically for this manuscript from the Portuguese visual artist, João Ventura.

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 costa's profile page

Praise for Scent of a Lie: da costa builds his fictional world with infinite patience and skill. Every line, every word takes the reader directly into the lives and homes of the extraordinary people of these villages.

W.O. Mitchell prize Jury

Praise for Scent of a Lie: Paying homage to a fabulist tradition running from Marquez and Borges and Carlos Fuentes all the way back to Cervantes, da costa evokes his God-beset, earthbound peasants, priests and villagers with palpable, redolent precision.

Jim Bartley, The Globe and Mail

His work makes us see, feel and be more: to have profound insights into our lives and the world; to understand what makes us live the way we do and realize that perhaps we ought to be living another way to fulfill our humanity.

Canadian Writer's Abroad