Adam Morris Books in Order

Adam Morris was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1983 and now lives in California. He works as a writer, editor, and literary translator, mostly bringing Portuguese and Spanish language books into English. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, but books are clearly where his longest conversations happen.

He came to Latin American literature for a simple reason: he found himself getting bored with a lot of the American fiction he was reading.

That boredom turned out to be useful. Morris went on to earn a PhD in literature from Stanford University in 2015, and during his academic research he began digging deeply into twentieth and twenty-first century Latin American writing. Teachers pointed him toward contemporary Brazilian literature, and one of the writers who hit him hard was João Gilberto Noll. Morris has said that translation starts when a writer's voice gets under his skin. From there, he reads widely, listens closely, and tries to become as clear a conduit as he can.

Voice comes first.

His early breakthrough as a translator came with Hilda Hilst's With My Dog Eyes, a short, intense novel about a professor coming apart at the seams. From there he helped bring more Brazilian fiction into English, including João Gilberto Noll's Quiet Creature on the Corner and Atlantic Hotel, and Beatriz Bracher's I Didn't Talk. He also coedited Essays on Hilda Hilst, the first English-language collection of criticism devoted to Hilst. Readers who like Morris's book world tend to enjoy unstable narrators, moral unease, political pressure, and prose that feels alive on the sentence level.

He doesn't seem especially interested in safe books.

That same curiosity shows up in his own nonfiction. American Messiahs looks at self-proclaimed prophets and communal religious movements in the United States, moving from early American sects to Father Divine and Jim Jones. An earlier piece, The Divine Inspiration of Jim Jones, zeroes in on the strange and revealing relationship between Jones and Father Divine's Peace Mission. What makes Morris interesting as a nonfiction writer is that he doesn't stop at spectacle. He looks at why these movements attracted followers, what kinds of social criticism they made, and what they say about American life.

Across his translations, scholarship, and original writing, a few interests keep returning. He is drawn to people on the edge of institutions, to figures who drift, break, preach, remember, or refuse easy categories. He pays attention to the way belief shapes ordinary life, whether that belief is religious, political, artistic, or personal. Even when the books are dark, there is usually a strong pull toward the question of how people make meaning when the world stops making sense.

Morris has received the Susan Sontag Foundation Prize in literary translation, a PEN/Heim translation grant, and two Northern California Book Awards in prose translation. He has also spent time in residence at the Instituto Hilda Hilst, the University of Rochester Humanities Center, the Faber Institute, and Banff Centre. These days he continues to live in California, writing, translating, and making room in English for books that might otherwise stay just out of reach.