City of Saints and Madmen: A Novel (The Ambergris Trilogy #1)
Staff Reviews
Jeff Vandermeer's maddening, metafictional masterpiece. After finishing the book I am left wondering, am I truly sitting in Eagle Eye Book Shop, tapping out a book review on the computer and thinking about what to make for dinner? Or am I actually in Ambergris, slumped by the banks of the River Moth, scratching out a review for an imaginary book on the lichen coated walls? In a book with this many layers you can't help but lose yourself between them, forgetting where your life ends and the text begins. A book unlike any I have read before.
Description
From Jeff VanderMeer, the author of Borne and Annihilation, comes the paperback reissue of his cult classic City of Saints and Madmen. In this reinvention of the literature of the fantastic, you hold in your hands an invitation to a place unlike any you’ve ever visited—an invitation delivered by one of our most audacious and astonishing literary magicians.
City of elegance and squalor. Of religious fervor and wanton lusts. And everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, an incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origin. In Ambergris, a would-be suitor discovers that a sunlit street can become a killing ground in the blink of an eye. An artist receives an invitation to a beheading—and finds himself enchanted. And a patient in a mental institution is convinced that he’s made up a city called Ambergris, imagined its every last detail, and that he’s really from a place called Chicago . . .
By turns sensuous and terrifying, filled with exotica and eroticism, this interwoven collection of stories, histories, and “eyewitness” reports invokes a universe within a puzzle box where you can lose—and find—yourself again.