A roadkill crew in rural Brazil finds the wrong kind of body.Edgar Wilson has left behind his job as a stunner at the slaughterhouse. He now spends his days collecting the bodies of animals killed on the road, transporting them to a facility where they are ground down in a massive mill and turned into compost. On an otherwise ordinary day, the insistent cries of vultures draw him deep into the brush, where he comes upon the body of a woman, hanging gently from a tree, swaying in the stillness. He knows he is not meant to collect human remains - but nothing around him seems to fulfil the role it was meant to play. Neither the police nor the healthcare system has the tools to handle such a scene.With stark, economical prose, Ana Paula Maia constructs a world where the boundaries between animal and human, good and evil, shift and blur. Bury Your Dead confirms the fierce power of Maia's literary vision, marking her out as one of the most original voices in contemporary Brazilian literature.As in Of Cattle and Men , where she crafted a luminous poetics through a slow, contemplative rhythm, and in On Earth As It Is Beneath , a dizzying thriller in which a prison director hunts down his own inmates, Maia once again sets out to recycle death in search of the sacred - even within the most putrefied remnants of human matter.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"Not of the soul, nor of the heart. Ana Paula Maia's characters suffer from the liver." -O Estado de S. Paulo
"One must possess a profound understanding of fiction, of reality, and of the representation of reality to be able to write like this." -O Globo
"Amid the most repugnant manoeuvres, Ana Paula Maia discovers the mythic tone of a biblical curse, cloaked beneath the pop sensibilities of the surface." -Rolling Stone Brazil
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Praise for Ana Paula Maia
"This short sharp shock of a book brings a surprise with every new page...a fresh and spirited report on how civilisation has done nothing to tame humanity's worst instincts." -The Guardian
"Brutal yet gripping, as if Cormac McCarthy penned an anti-meat noir." -Kirkus
"Intense and provocative....This goes straight for the jugular." -Publishers Weekly
"In Perry's visceral, understated translation...the narrative unfolds with the compulsiveness of a psychological thriller." -The Times Literary Supplement
"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
"Biblical in scale and language, Of Cattle and Men is a book to squirm beneath; to measure oneself against." -Southwest Review
"Of Cattle and Men is an excellent book of many dark, quiet questions." -World Literature Today
"Powerful." -EcoLit Books
"A fast-paced and impactful book (...) Ana Paula Maia treads her own path, and it's a brutal one. All the better for us." -Escotilha
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Sprache
Verlagsort
Produkt-Hinweis
Illustrationen
Maße
Höhe: 198 mm
Breite: 129 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-917260-34-3 (9781917260343)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Ana Paula Maia (Nova Iguacu, Brazil, 1977) is an author and scriptwriter who has published several novels, including O habitante das falhas subterraneas (2003), and the 'Saga of Brutes' trilogy which comprises Entre rinhas de cachorros e porcos abatidos (2009), O trabalho sujo dos outros (2009) and Carvao animal (2011). De gados e homens (2013), translated for Charco Press as Of Cattle and Men by Zoe Perry (2023) won the UK Republic of Consciousness Prize 2023 as well as the inaugural Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation in the US. Maia also won the Sao Paulo Literature Prize for Best Novel of the Year two years in a row: in 2018 for the novel On Earth as it is Beneath, and in 2019 for Bury Your Dead , forthcoming from Charco Press in 2027.
Padma Viswanathan is a Canadian-American writer and translator. Her novels have been published in eight countries and shortlisted for the PEN USA Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and others. She has published short fiction, essays and translations in Granta, The Boston Review, BRICK , and elsewhere. Full-length translations include Sao Bernardo , by Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos and Where We Stand , by Djamila Ribeiro. Her most recent novel, The Charterhouse of Padma , came out in 2024. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, where she is Founding Director of the Arkansas International Writer-at-Risk Residency Program.
