About the Book
City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris.
Tähtifantasia award 2008.
In City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer has reinvented 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 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 puzzlebox where you
can lose – and find – yourself again.
