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 Lobato is a Brazilian writer and literary translator who teaches English and creative writing at Grinnell College. Her translation of The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel won the National Book Award for Translated Literature.

"A thrill. Francisco Maciel's There's No Point in Dying shows real talent . . . exhilarating, polyphonic . . . This remarkably inventive and haunting novel blurs the line between reality and fantasy, challenging the reader to keep up and pay attention. It's a nightmare of a book, but it's my kind of nightmare."--Luiza Sauma in The Telegraph

"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

"There's No Point in Dying is a harrowing novel in vignettes, a story of a community intent on survival through whatever means necessary."--Foreword Reviews

"Intriguing . . . a surreal read which captures a sense of desperation and topics from climate change to samba."--The Irish News

"Comedy and tragedy change places as quickly as the narrative point of view . . . What results is a wheeling, collective novel where lives bleed together, the distinction between pursued and pursuer blurs, and private and public crises eclipse each other by the sentence."--Asymptote

"Reads like a scrapbook or family album of a Brazilian city, in this case Rio de Janeiro . . . There are episodes that flesh out Brazil's troubled past . . . And there are cautions about Brazil's precarious future."--Southwest Review

"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

Publisher: New Vessel Press

Pub date: 2026-01-13

Length: 312 pages