An artist receives an invitation to a beheading - and finds himself enchanted. In Ambergris, a would-be suitor discovers that a sunlit street can become a killing ground in the blink of an eye. And everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, an incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origin. 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.Ĭity of elegance and squalor. Mass Market Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.In City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer has reinvented the literature of the fantastic. Serious review attention could break him out though it will take a novel that makes some concessions to the marketplace to lure a major publisher. (May) Forecast: Recently named by Locus On-Line as one of the 10 best short-story writers in the field, VanderMeer has avoided doing the kind of thing the big, increasingly commercial houses are willing to take on.
This beautifully written, virtually hallucinatory work isn't for every taste, but connoisseurs of the finest in postmodern fantasy will find it enormously rewarding.
Other pieces take many forms, including a history of the city complete with footnotes, psychiatric records from a local hospital, an amazingly funny work of pseudo-biology entitled King Squid and entirely bogus bibliographies and glossaries. Among the highlights are the World Fantasy Award$winning Transformation of Martin Lake, the tale of a talented painter who's obsessed with a great composer The Strange Case of X, which concerns an incarcerated lunatic found wandering the streets of Ambergris carrying the very book being discussed in this review the wonderful new story The Cage, in which an antiques dealer becomes infected with a fungus that's slowly taking over much of the city and, oddest of all perhaps, an untitled short story, which fills the entire dust jacket and concerns an unnamed traveler who has a close encounter with a giant squid in the river that runs through Ambergris.
Set in the haunted city of Ambergris, with its Borges Bookstore, these stories feature bizarre recurring characters and intensely self-referential plots. Publisher's Weekly A master of postmodern game playing, VanderMeer (The Exchange) here gathers all the fiction published in his earlier trade paper collection (also titled, in a typically Borgesian maneuver, City of Saints and Madmen), plus an equal amount of new material.
0 kommentar(er)
