Sea Loves Me: Selected Stories

"When António Emílio Leite Couto was 3 years old, he renamed himself Mia, or miaow, confessing that “I didn’t just like cats; I thought I was a cat.” Considered one of Lusophone Africa’s most influential writers, Couto, a native of Mozambique and 2014 recipient of the Neustadt Prize, is best known for his short fiction that dissects the burdens of race, history and culture in the aftermath of Mozambique’s 1974 independence from Portugal. As with his natural affinity toward cats, Couto’s stories — deftly translated by David Brookshaw and Eric M.B. Becker — represent graceful attempts to transcend barriers between the colonizer and colonized, native and settler, human and animal, matter and antimatter."