São Paulo (The Ugliest City You'll Ever Love)

Discover why New York Times bestselling author Brian Winter calls São Paulo the ugliest city you’ll ever fall in love with.

How in the world did a humble Jesuit trading post manage to overtake its glamorous sibling, Rio de Janeiro, and become the engine of modern-day Brazil—and indeed the premier city of the Southern Hemisphere?

Brian Winter, who lived in São Paulo with his family for half a decade and still returns multiple times a year, leads us through this vast metropolis marked by endless traffic, vertical neighborhoods, and overlapping spheres of wealth and precarity. We discover the city’s deep lineage of immigration and the crucial place of foreignness in its collective identity; the resilience of its historically marginalized communities and the absurd excesses of its upper classes; and the remarkably enduring way families of modest origins can work their way up to fortune, fame, and influence.

Expansive and intimate, São Paulo is the story of a city fueled by ambition and improvisation, by a legendary work ethic and an equally impressive respect for pleasure, and by the abiding faith that anyone, everyone, is welcome.

“São Paulo… when it’s finished, it’ll be pretty.”

About TRAVEL WITH A WRITER

Travel with a Writer begins with a simple idea: places become more interesting in the company of someone who knows them well.

The series brings readers together with bestselling, award-winning, and acclaimed writers in places they know intimately. Some will already be familiar to English-language readers. Others are major literary voices in their own countries and regions whom we are delighted to introduce in English.

At a time when information about where to go has never been easier to find, these books offer something harder to access: somebody else’s way of seeing a city. They invite readers to experience it like a local by entering it through the memories, observations, and imagination of a writer who has called it home. Literature has always allowed us to spend time inside another life. Travel with a Writer brings that literary intimacy to place.

We give every writer the same invitation: write a short narrative about a place you have called home, for the would-be traveler. We choose writers whose work we admire and trust their instincts about how best to bring a place to life. What each writer makes of the invitation is entirely their own.

Original writing is accompanied by curated walks, maps, infographics, and cultural recommendations, allowing readers who do travel to follow the writer’s perspective off the page and into the place itself. 

Read a book before a trip, carry it through a city, return to it after coming home, or travel entirely from home.

Author by author, place by place, a global literary atlas takes shape. 

In 2027 and beyond, the series will continue to expand with acclaimed writers taking readers inside cities around the world, with forthcoming and developing titles including Chicago with Rebecca Makkai, Bogota with Santiago Gamboa, Berlin with Norman Ohler, Athens with Amanda Michalopoulou, Lisbon with Gonçalo Tavares, Buenos Aires with Martín Caparrós, Vancouver with Ian Williams, and Hanoi with Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai.

About THE WALKING TREE

Founded in French in March 2025 as L’arbre qui marche by former journalists and editors Nadia Krovnikoff and François Saugier, The Walking Tree is an independent publishing house devoted to new ways of writing about place. Travel with a Writer has expanded internationally, with editions now available in French, Italian, and Spanish.

Its U.S. and UK publishing program, The Walking Tree, is led by Kristina Kearns, former executive and editorial director of McSweeney’s and operations director of Fitzcarraldo Editions, with Daniel Levin Becker, former literary and features editor of The Believer.