Of Cattle and Men

By the International Booker Prize Shortlisted Author of On Earth As It Is Beneath

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.

Ana Paula Maia is the author of On Earth As It Is Beneath, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Her novel Of Cattle and Men won the UK Republic of Consciousness Prize, the inaugural Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation in the United States, and an English PEN Translates Award. An award-winning Brazilian writer and scriptwriter, she is widely regarded as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Brazilian fiction.

Zoë Perry is a Canadian-American translator who has translated work by several contemporary Portuguese-language authors, including Emilio Fraia, Clara Drummond, Rodrigo de Souza Leão, Lourenço Mutarelli, and Carol Bensimon. Her translations have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Astra, n+1 and The Paris Review. Zoë 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 . Her translation of Ana Paula Maia's Of Cattle and Men won the inaugural Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation in 2023. She is a founding member of the Starling Bureau, a translators collective.