Praise for BogotÁ

"The first thing to know about Alan Grostephan's novel Bogotá is that it is extraordinary...Fiction about slum life is often journalistic or ideological, but Mr. Grostephan describes the neighborhood's squalor in forthright, naturalistic prose streaked with acid irony. (The bitterly evoked dread and stagnation reminded me of Dostoevsky's back-alley St. Petersburg in Crime and Punishment.)"

—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"With unflinching brutality and rawness, this remarkably executed debut novel achieves a highly original, catchy prose--often mingling Spanish slang throughout its hardboiled, supercharged narrative... the novel follows each member of [a] displaced family and their variegated efforts to make do, and the multifaceted stories flow seamlessly, helped by the author's evocative, layered prose...the author's focus on the downtrodden feels uniquely visceral and real."

—Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"Riveting...Grostephan's prose fits his subject; his sentences are as busy as a Third World market. Images crowd and clash, the narrative jumps and clatters...a brutal picaresque."

—John Reimringer, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Bogotá is a miracle of a novel, with its compellingly elegant style in service of an anguished story: how to stay human in the face of the ravaging poverty and violence that is slum life in present-day Columbia...Grostephan is a gifted, serious, compassionate writer, a most welcome new voice."

—Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood