Saga of Brutes draws together three confronting and darkly comic stories: “Between Dog Fights and Hog Slaughter,” “The Dirty Work of Others,” and “carbo animalis,” published in one volume for the first time. Ana Paula Maia’s no-holds barred narrative pulls few punches, describing a shocking reality of the lives of the invisible workingmen who, like Atlas, are forced to carry society’s burdens. These heroes of vile circumstance―coal miners, firemen, garbage collectors, crematorium workers―are the soot-covered supermen who risk their lives performing difficult and dangerous work for others. But in the end, they, too, amount to nothing but carbo animalis―notwithstanding the impure relation of coal to diamonds. Despite their straightforwardness, Ana Paula Maia’s stories are filled with great insight and compassion for the lives of the men who live on the edge of a society built with their own sweat.

Saga of Brutes (Brazilian Literature)

Literature & Fiction

Maia, Ana Paula

Literary

Dalkey Archive Press

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.

Of Cattle and Men

Charco Press

<div>Three characters are united by fire--a firefighter, a corpse incinerator, and a coal miner. Their setting and time could be any, but everything is perpetually on the edge of collapse. Coal and corpses provide society's energy, jobs are violent and alienating, and life is a series of reactions where the future is irrelevant.&nbsp; &#8203;Carbón animal es la historia de tres hombres vinculados por el fuego: el bombero Ernesto Wesley, su hermano Ronivon, incinerador de cadáveres, y Edgar Wilson, minero del carbón. Los tres malviven en un lugar que podría estar tanto en Brasil como en cualquier otra parte, siempre que sea tierra arrasada; durante una época que podría ser cualquiera, siempre que todo esté acabado o a punto de acabarse. En ese tiempo y lugar, la energía se obtiene del carbón mineral y los cadáveres, los oficios son violentos o alienantes y la vida es una serie de reacciones donde el futuro no tiene ningún papel. En ese paisaje desolador, Ana Paula Maia es capaz de construir una novela profundamente lírica y humana, un drama corregido por un humor incendiario y cargado de imágenes casi cinematográficas.</div>

Carbón animal (Spanish Edition)

Contemporary

Malpaso Editorial

De ganados y hombres

Siruela

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