Rebellion in the Backlands

An unforgettable epic history of war and rebellion that has been called "the Bible of Brazilian nationality." Euclides da Cunha's classic account of the brutal campaigns against religious mystic Antonio Conselheiro has been praised by readers around the world as perhaps the greatest book ever written about Brazil. An epic of nonfiction that reads like a novel, it has been hailed by the likes of Stefan Zweig and Elizabeth Hardwick for its prose and its insights into the character of Brazil as the nation was being formed. Da Cunha tells the story of a guerrilla rebellion in the remote village of Canudos that fought the central government from 1893 to 1897, of the challenging conditions that led the people to revolt, and of the violent repression that resulted. A national epic like no other, Rebellion in the Backlands is a lasting classic, a book that has been handed from reader to reader for decades.

Euclides da Cunha's classic account of the brutal campaigns against religious mystic Antonio Conselheiro has been called the Bible of Brazilian nationality. Euclides da Cunha went on the campaigns [against Conselheiro] as a journalist and what he returned with and published in 1902 is still unsurpassed in Latin American literature. Cunha is a talent as grand, spacious, entangled with knowledge, curiosity, and bafflement as the country itself. . . . On every page there is a heart of idea, speculation, dramatic observation that tells of a creative mission undertaken, the identity of the nation, and also the creation of a pure and eloquent prose style.--Elizabeth Hardwick, Bartleby in Manhattan