City of God

Praise for City of God

“A Scarface-like urban epic, bursting with encyclopedic, graphic descriptions of violence, punctuated with lyricism and longing.” -Publishers Weekly

“Lins, himself a survivor of the City of God, has a knack for making vignettes of such unremitting desperation remarkably lyrical.” –Library Journal

“What non-Portuguese speaking folks may not know is that Fernando Mereilles and Katia Lund’s epic film was adapted from an equally epic novel by Paulo Lins… City of God the novel should definitely be read as a work in its own right.” –The Fader

“Raw, brutal, and graphically violent, City of God, by Paolo Lins, is a multifaceted story about hellish life and early death in a Brazilian slum, where family ties can be severed as easily as a kite string.” –Lylah M. Alphonse, The Boston Globe

“Paulo Lins is shaking up the Brazilian literary market with City of God…. In the hands of Paulo Lins, the City of God transforms into a metaphor for hell, described with the sensibility of a poet. A vertiginous novel whose reportage explodes in the reader’s face as gusts of words, disturbing and inflaming the conscience.”–Correio Braziliense

“A book-length beating… [that] deserves to be remembered as an event… A momentum that will rivet the reader until the end… Intensely visual in the style of an action film. The deliberate and insolent insistence of the lyrical tone… gives the novel a distinctive streak of resistance, of refusal, that is difficult to imagine in a writer less resolutely nonconformist.” –Foha de Sao Paulo

“City of God is a delirious book… [with] lyrical peaks, and the velocity of a gunshot.” –Veja

“Compared to the film’s aesthetic, which has been compared to that of Tarantino, Lins’s novel is throughout a story almost journalistic in nature, one that could have been written by Kapuscinski or by the Truman Capote of In Cold Blood.” –Richard Ruiz Garzóoacute;n, La Razón (Spain)

“Just as the conquerors invented a language to describe an undiscovered landscape and to make it their own, Lins conquers with words the subworld of the favelas-frightening, maddening, claustrophobic, in reality only imaginable in fantastic terms. City of God is an irreproachable and necessary work, an impressive immersion in the dominions of Mr. Hyde.” –Javier Aparicio Maydeu, El Pa’s (Spain)

“Heartbreaking… The routineness of death, its stutters and repetitions, are the success of the book, even if they do not make for easy reading.” –Gilles Lapouge, La Quinzaine Littraire (France)

“The novel recounts several years in the life of the City of God … ending in a terrible gang war worthy of a Scorsese film. Eye-opening.” –Guy Duplat, La Libre Belgique (Belgium)