Of Cattle and Men

Winner of the 2023 Cercador Prize

Shortlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize

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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 & over again, as the stun operator at Senhor Milo’s slaughterhouse: reliable, responsible, quietly dispatching cows & 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 & 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, & animals, to murder & madness.

Ana Paula Maia & Zoë Perry’s Of Cattle & Men is markedly less beatific, instead evoking something akin to biblical wrath in its depiction of a sequestered slaughterhouse beset by karmic hardship. Whether bad luck, rival agitators, or a full-fledged moral reckoning is to blame for the trouble, the undeniable result is nothing less than an accursed, all-consuming inferno of piety & rage. OF CATTLE & MEN "lays bare the brutal labor of the slaughterhouse trade," & is a "new breed of western." —The Cercador Prize

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Ana Paula Maia (Brazil, 1977) is an author & scriptwriter & has published several novels, including O habitante das falhas subterráneas (2003), De gados e homens (2013), & the trilogy A saga dos brudos, comprising Entre  de cachorros e porcos abatidos (2009), O trabalho sujo dos outros (2009) & Carvão animal (2011). 

Zoë Perry has translated work by Brazilian & Portuguese authors, including: Emilio Fraia & Veronica Stigger.