On Earth As It Is Beneath Ana Paula Maia 9781917260107

On land where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered, the state built a penal colony in the wilderness, where inmates could be rehabilitated, but never escape. Now, decades later, and having only succeeded in trapping men, not changing them for the better, its operations are winding down. But in the prison's waning days, a new horror is unleashed: every full-moon night, the inmates are released, the warden is armed with rifles, and the hunt begins. Every man plans his escape, not knowing if his end will come at the hands of a familiar face, or from the unknown dangers beyond the prison walls. Ana Paula Maia has once again delivered a bracing vision of our potential for violence, and our collective failure to account for the consequences of our social and political action, or inaction. No crime is committed out of view for this novelist, and her raw, brutal power enlists us all as witness.

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.

"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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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