Overview
""Alluring . . . powerful . . . an indelible depiction of a community on the brink of disaster.""-Publishers Weekly In this kaleidoscopic novel set in a favela of Rio de Janeiro-""in the city of stray bullets, in the land of lost opportunities""-a gang member runs wildly through the streets not knowing he has only seven minutes left to live. Barflies, prostitutes, immigrants, a gay couple, a taxi driver, cops, a mobster, and more populate Francisco Maciel's first book to appear in English. Leaping back and forth across time and spiraling into the surreal, the novel coalesces around a brutal massacre. Maciel's multiracial characters write poetry and discourse on soccer, insects, samba, and climate change. Gritty, unpredictable, and percussive,There's No Point in Dying is translated by National Book Award winner Bruna Dantas Lobato.
Full Product Details
Author: Francisco Maciel ,
Bruna Dantas Lobato
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Imprint: New Vessel Press
Dimensions:
Width: 13.30cm
, Height: 1.20cm
, Length: 20.30cm
ISBN: 9781954404397
ISBN 10: 1954404395
Pages: 312
Publication Date: 13 January 2026
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Not yet available
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.
Reviews
""Set in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, Maciel's alluring English-language debut strings together phantasmagoric vignettes . . . Maciel crafts powerful set pieces . . . It's an indelible depiction of a community on the brink of disaster.""--Publishers Weekly ""A novel in circles, the force of which hurls its characters toward the center, with an ever-increasing intensity, making them disappear and reappear, letting an aura of purity shine through. In the end, they all desire a lost innocence. It's neither a world of criminals nor victims, but of humans subjected to every misfortune.""--Rascunho, The Newspaper of Brazilian Literature
""A novel in circles, the force of which hurls its characters toward the center, with an ever-increasing intensity, making them disappear and reappear, letting an aura of purity shine through. In the end, they all desire a lost innocence. It's neither a world of criminals nor victims, but of humans subjected to every misfortune.""--Rascunho, The Newspaper of Brazilian Literature
Author Information
Francisco Maciel was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1950, the son of a maid and a shopkeeper. He became a manual laborer before age six, when he went to school to escape such work and later managed to enter an elite high school. He studied journalism at university but gave up because he felt ""too foolish and unprepared for life,"" before hitchhiking around South America. Bruna Dantas Lobatoby Stenio Gardel won the National Book Award for Translated Literature.
