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Notes on contributors
Victoria Shorr
Victoria Shorr's novel Backlands (2015) is based on her travels through the sertão in the late 1980s-1990s with the photographer Anna Mariani. The anecdotes in the novel are based on interviews with people alive in the villages they passed through who remembered Lampião, Maria Bonita, and their band of jagunços.
The title of the following excerpt from Backlands, “The River of Disorder,” is a phrase that the author credits to the playwright Ariano Suassuna. The passage poignantly dramatizes the intense relationship of the people of the backlands with the land and Lampião's love of his sertão.