Author(s): Ana Paula Maia; Zoë Perry (Translator)

Novel | Brazil | Translated fiction | Crime and Thriller | Charco Press | 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize long list | 2024 Republic of Conscousness Prize short list

Animals go mad and men die (accidentally and not) at a slaughterhouse in an impoverished, isolated corner of Brazil.

In a landscape worthy of Cormac McCarthy, the river runs septic with blood. Edgar Wilson makes the sign of the cross on the forehead of a cow, then stuns it with a mallet. He does this over and over again, as the stun operator at Senhor Milo's slaughterhouse: reliable, responsible, quietly dispatching cows and following orders, wherever that may take him. It's important to calm the cows, especially now that they seem so unsettled: they have begun to run in panic into walls and over cliffs. Bronco Gil, the foreman, thinks it's a jaguar or a wild boar. Edgar Wilson has other suspicions. But what is certain is that there is something in this desolate corner of Brazil driving men, and animals, to murder and madness. 

Review:

"Brutal yet gripping, as if Cormac McCarthy penned an anti-meat noir." -Kirkus

"Maia's stark style lends her novella a chilling, detached quality, allowing the violence and viscera to be all the more overwhelming." -Jeremy Garber, Powell's Bookshop

Author Biography:

Ana Paula Maia (Brazil, 1977) is an author and scriptwriter and has published several novels, including O habitante das falhas subterraneas (2003), De gados e homens (2013), and the trilogy A saga dos brudos, comprising Entre rinhas de cachorros e porcos abatidos (2009), O trabalho sujo dos outros (2009) and Carvao animal (2011). Her novel A guerra dos bastardos (2007) won praise in Germany as among the best foreign detective fiction. As a scriptwriter she has worked on a wide range of projects for television, cinema and theatre.The author won the Sao Paulo de Literatura Prize for Best Novel of the Year two years in a row: in 2018 for her novel Assim na Terra como embaixo da Terra, and in 2019 for Enterre Seus Mortos .

Zoe Perry is a Canadian-American translator who has translated work by several contemporary Portuguese-language authors, including Emilio Fraia, Clara Drummond, Rodrigo de Souza Leao, Lourenco Mutarelli, and Carol Bensimon. Her translations have appeared in the New Yorker , Granta , Astra , n+1 and The Paris Review. Zoe was awarded a PEN/Heim grant for her translation of Veronica Stigger's Opisanie Swiata and was selected for a residency at the Banff International Translation Centre for her translation of Emilio Fraia's Sevastopol . She is a founding member of the Starling Bureau, a translators collective.