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Alice in Thunderland & Other Stories

Alice in Thunderland & Other Stories

$24.00

By Teolinda Gersão
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

In Alice in Thunderland & Other Stories, Teolinda Gersão turns an attentive, often unsettling eye on the hidden lives of ordinary people. Her stories begin in the familiar world and then, almost imperceptibly, open onto the dreamlike or absurd, revealing quiet acts of resistance. With extraordinary precision and economy, Gersão explores the shifting boundaries between reality and imagination, tenderness and violence, silence and speech.

In the celebrated “The Red Fox Fur Coat,” a bank clerk’s obsessive desire for a luxurious coat becomes the catalyst for a startling transformation, an audacious and subversive story about the animal instincts and longing for freedom that may lie beneath the constraints of ordinary life. In “The Woman Who Stole the Rain,” a tale of grief, loneliness and collective fear unfolds within the unlikely setting of an elegant Lisbon hotel, blurring the boundaries between folklore and reality. At the heart of the collection is “Alice in Thunderland,” Gersão’s reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who steps out of the story that has confined her to reclaim her own voice.

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa, these stories showcase the imaginative daring that has made Gersão one of Portugal’s most acclaimed contemporary writers.

Publication date: November 19, 2026
Now available for pre-order

American and international customers can order directly through our distributor, Asterism Books.

Category:
Price: $24.00 CDN
NOVEMBER 2026
ISBN: 9781777626488
Softcover / 164 pages / 13.3 x 20.3 cm (5.25″ x 8″)
Short stories

About the author
Teolinda Gersão was born in Coimbra (Portugal) in 1940. After studying English and German at the University of Coimbra, she pursued postgraduate studies in Germany at the Universities of Tübingen and Berlin; during her final year in Berlin, she lectured on Portuguese at the Technical University. She returned to Portugal and taught at the University of Lisbon, then at Universidade Nova, where she was Professor of German Literature and Comparative Literature until 1995. She also spent two years in São Paulo, Brazil, and a short time in Mozambique, where she lived in the capital, then known as Lourenço Marques and now called Maputo, the setting for her 1997 novel A Árvore das Palavras (The Word Tree).

Her novels and short stories have earned her many prizes in Portugal, including the Prémio P.E.N. Clube, the Prémio Literário Fundação Inês de Castro, the Prémio Vergílio Ferreira, and the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. She has won Portugal’s highest award for the novel twice and its highest award for the short story twice: the APE Grand Prize for Novel and Novella (1995/2024) and the APE Camilo Castelo Branco Grand Prize for Short Fiction (2002, 2017). She is an honorary member of the Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading in Rio de Janeiro. Her fiction has appeared in the BBC, New York Public Radio, W.W. Norton, Symphony Space Theatre, New York, The Common, and Words Without Borders.

Gersão’s most recent book is Autobiografia não escrita de Marta Freud (2024), winner of the APE/DGLAB Grand Prize for Novel and Novella and the Urbano Tavares Rodrigues Prize. Her work has been translated into 23 languages. A former writer-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley, she lives and works in Lisbon. For more information, visit her website: www.teolindagersao.com

About the translator
Margaret Jull Costa has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers, including Javier Marías, José Saramago, Eça de Queirós, Fernando Pessoa, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Teolinda Gersão and César Vallejo. Her translations have won, among others, the International IMPAC Literary Award, the PEN Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize, and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. In 2014, she was awarded an OBE for services to literature, and in 2018, the Ordem Infante D. Henrique from the Portuguese government and a Lifetime Award for Excellence in Translation from the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute in New York. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Praise for Alice in Thunderland & Other Stories
“Humour and female anguish create a heady brew in these stellar stories from revered, prize-winning author Teolinda Gersão. A woman’s desires turn her into a fox, and a dog in need of an umbrella utters a collection-unifying theme of: “no one shares anything with anyone.” Surrealism and magic dazzle us on these pages. But it is the truth-telling of the famous Alice in the title story, and the unforgettable, shocking matter-of-factness of the Virgin Mary in “The Messenger,” that form the real, clear-eyed ballasts to this collection. Readers across the English-speaking world will thrill to Gersão’s passionate and singular voice.”
~Katherine Vaz, author of Above the Salt, Mariana, Fado & Other Stories, Our Lady of the Artichoke and Other Portuguese American Stories, and Saudade.
“In this stunning new collection, Teolinda Gersao lifts the art of the short story to an exquisite new level, reminding us with every tale of why world literature can only benefit from more Portuguese writers being made available in English.”
~Hilary Owen, Senior Research Fellow, University of Oxford
Professor Emerita in Portuguese and Luso-African Studies, University of Manchester
~”With wit, imagination, and a wonderfully sharp eye for human nature, Teolinda Gersão turns everyday life into something strange and unforgettable. These finely crafted stories move effortlessly between realism and the surreal, illuminating the absurdities, anxieties, and small revelations of being human. A brilliant collection from a major Portuguese writer.”
Sandra Sousa, Professor at the University of Central Florida
~”In this fascinating collection of eighteen beautifully crafted stories, Teolinda Gersão captures the sometimes wondrously magical, other times eerily disturbing nature of what we experience as everyday life.”
Darlene J. Sadlier, Professor Emerita of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University

 

 

 

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