Johnny Lorenz reads from Itamar Vieira Junior's CROOKED PLOW (Verso Books, 2023)

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize
Winner of the Jabuti (Best Brazilian Novel)

"An aching yet tender story of our origins of violence, of how we spend our lives trying to bloom love and care from them, and of the language and silence we need to fuel our tending."
—International Booker Prize 2024

"A stirring, lived-in novel of struggles both personal and societal."
—starred review, Kirkus Reviews

"Lorenz's English translation deserves credit for conveying the understated lyricism and concentrated power of Vieira Junior's storytelling ... Crooked Plow is highly readable fiction, a flowing and clear novel that wears its experimentalism lightly while exploring a long history of exploitation and resistance."
—Cate Farr, Oxonian Review

"[Crooked Plow] is extraordinarily well written, offers a window into the interior lives of a class of people rarely considered outside of academic studies, and is suffused with tenderness and compassion for its characters and their plight.”
—Larry Rohter, The New York Review of Books

Deep in Brazil's neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother's bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever. Heralded as a new masterpiece and the most important Brazilian novel of this century, this fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in the Brazil's poorest region, three generations after the abolition of slavery in that country is at once fantastic and realist, covering themes of family, spirituality, slavery and its aftermath and political struggle.

Author bio
Itamar Vieira Junior was born in Salvador, Bahia, in 1979. He holds a doctorate in Ethnic and African Studies. Before Crooked Plow, he published a collection of short stories entitled The Executioner’s Prayer, which was nominated for Brazil’s biggest literary award, the Jabuti. Crooked Plow (published by Verso) won the prestigious 2018 LeYa Award in Portugal and Brazil's Jabuti Prize, and it was a finalist for the International Booker Prize. The English translation of Itamar Vieira Junior’s second novel, Saving the Fire, will appear in 2025.

Translator bio
Johnny Lorenz is a translator, poet and literary critic. He is a professor at Montclair State University. His translation of Clarice Lispector's A Breath of Life (New Directions) was a finalist for Best Translated Book Award, and his translation of Lispector's The Besieged City (New Directions) was listed as one of the Best Books of 2019 by Vanity Fair. His translation of Crooked Plow (Verso) by Itamar Vieira Junior received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and was a finalist for the International Booker Prize.

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