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Winner of the São Paulo Prize for Best Book of the Year, The Front by Edimilson de Almeida Pereira introduces us to a nameless figure who refers to himself only as a “man-tree.” He lives beneath the din of police helicopters and beside an imposing garbage dump, where, as a child, he’d hunt for books. How will he respond to a system that attempts, relentlessly, through its tedium and violence, to silence him?
This separation between there and here, between them and us, transformed the child in me too soon into an adult. There's something painful in this development, from being a child burning with joy, despite his own fear, to becoming a man who, every minute of the day, holds himself back from setting the world on fire.
The Front is an astonishingly original novel, one that nevertheless brings to mind James Baldwin’s unflinching critique of modern society and Clarice Lispector’s daring experiments with language. The Front introduces to English-language readers an important, deeply poetic voice from contemporary Brazil.
Edimilson de Almeida Pereira was born in 1963 in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil. He is a prolific, award-winning novelist, poet and scholar, as well as a professor of literature at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora. His novel The Front was the recipient of the 2021 São Paulo Prize for Best Book of the Year.
Johnny Lorenz is a professor of literature at Montclair State University. He has translated celebrated writers such as Clarice Lispector and published a book of poems, Education by Windows. His translation of Itamar Vieira Junior's Crooked Plow was a finalist for the International Booker Prize.