Corpos Secos
Dry Bodies
by Luisa Geisler, Marcelo Ferroni, Natalia Borges Polesso, Samir Machado de Machado
Alfaguara, 2021
192 pages
15×23 cm
In this eight-handed novel, a fatal disease plagues Brazil, turning the country in a post-apocaliptic land with no government, no law and no hope for the future. A bunch of survivors tries to cross the country, in a desperate journey to find a safe harbor.
It all begun with the use of new pesticides without proper testing. Then people started to notice unexpected reactions with the same larvae pesticides were supposed to decimate. It is not known who was the first infected, only that the outbreak began in Mato Grosso do Sul, and shortly after that the news stopped. Six months later, there are few survivors and the country is plagued by the so- called dry bodies: human specters, dead people with no brain activity, moving around and craving for blood.
Mateus is a young man apparently immune to the disease. He’s being studied by a medical team and needs to be protected at all costs as his blood may lead to a cure to save humanity. Regina has always been an housewife in her farm in the countryside. Now there’s nobody left, and she’ll have to react and find a way to get out of her isolation and avoid the dry bodies. Murilo is just a child, and as a child he thinks about what’s happening to the world but he’ll have to grow up quickly
in order to stay alive. Constância is a food engineer, and she’ll quickly realize that her technical knowledge is not barely enough to explain the terror ravaging the country.
Together they will narrate their days and their journey to the last safe place, in the extreme south of the country.
Not just a thriller and much more than a dystopia, this work written by four of the most interesting literary voices of contemporary Brazil seeks the limits of human wickedness as well as the chances of finding redemption in the middle of chaos.
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Winner of the Jabuti Prize 2021 a Best Entertainment Work
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Luisa Geisler was born in Canoas, in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, in 1991. She’s the author of Contos de Mentira (Tall Tales, 2011) and Quiçá (Maybe, 2012), both of which were awarded the Sesc Prize for Literature and shortlisted for the Jabuti Prize. Quiçá has also been shortlisted for the Machado de Assis Prize and the São Paulo Prize for Literature, and has been translated into Spanish. In 2012, the UK literary magazine Granta chose Luisa as one of the twenty best young Brazilian novelists writing today. More recently, Luisa was invited to take part in the Writers Omi residency program at the Ledig House in New York. Some of her short fiction works and other writings have been published in UK, Germany, France, Spain and the United States.
Marcelo Ferroni was born in June 1974, in São Paulo, and currently lives in Rio. He is the author of the books Dia dos Mortos (Day of the Dead, 2004), Practical Method of the Guerrilla (2010), Das Paredes, Meu Amor, Os Eslaves Contemplate Us (2014) and O fire in the forest (2017). He is also a book editor, married with two children. He made his literary debut in the anthology The Third Face (1995), edited by Gabriel Perissé.
Natalia Borges Polesso is a Brazilian writer and journalist and a PhD in Literary Theory. Her third short story collection, Amora – an exploration of the many different shades of homoaffective relations between women – won the Jabuti Prize 2016. The rights of Amora were sold to Argentina (Odelia), Spain (Raspabook) and USA (Amazon Crossing). In 2017 she was named among the Bogota39, a list of the most promising young writers in Latin America. Her short stories appeared on Electric Magazine, Bogotá39: Nuevas voces de ficcion lationoamericana and Latin American Literature Today.
Samir Machado de Machado is a Brazilian writer, he published O professor de Botânica (Não Editora 2008), Quatro soldados (Rocco 2013), Homens elegantes (Rocco 2016) Tupinilândia (Todavia 2018), published in France by Editions Métailié, the novel for children Piratas à vista (FTD Educação 2019). He is also one of the authors of Corpos secos (Alfaguara 2020). He is one of the founders of the publishing house Não Editora.
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