Gloriously translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Adam and Eve in Paradise by Ea de Queirsis not the rosy prelapsarian tale of your childhood Bible: yellow-eyed Adam is a slope-browed Neanderthal all alone and panicked, and Paradise is abominable (seethingly alive with vicious insects and roving primordial carnivores). Luckily for Adam, Eve appears: O wonder, there before Adam, as if it were both him and not him, was another Being very similar to him, only more slender and covered with a more silken down, and who was regarding him with wide, lustrous, liquid eyes And slowly, gently rubbing its bare knees together, the whole of this silken, tender Being was offering itself up in astonished, lascivious submission. It was Eve It was you, O Venerable Mother!

But still we must pity poor Adam and Eve: Our Parents tireless, desperate efforts were devoted entirely to surviving in the midst of a Nature that was ceaselessly, furiously plotting their destruction. And Adam and Eve spent those dayswhich Semitic texts celebrate as delightfulalways trembling, always whimpering, always fleeing!

Ea de Queirss pleasure in the glories of language and his delight in skewering all complacencies are richly palpable, leaving the reader smiling and sighing: Ahhh, those Genesiac days

Paperback | 64 pages | 4.50″ x 7.25″