Staff Pick
Enter Ambergris — a city inhabited by creatures called Mushroom Heads, hosts to an age-long fight against humans who cruelly colonized their ancestral home. VanderMeer holds his reader's attention through the short texts, which vary from personal accounts to faux historical documents. City of Saints and Madmen is bewildering, bemusing, and baffling. You'll want to return to Ambergris again and again, curious about unseen footnotes or to discover a new, dimly lit corner of this fictional city. Recommended By Alex Y., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"[W]e should admire the rare texture of the writing....Make the most of the tapestry of tales and visions before you. It is a rare treasure, to be tasted with both relish and respect. It is the work of an original. It's what you've been looking for." Michael Moorcock, World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient
Review
"Somewhere at the intersection of pulp and Surrealism....Unsettling, erudite, dark, shot through with unexpected humour, the stories engross and challenge endlessly." China Mieville, author of Perdido Street Station
Synopsis
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Steampunka grafting of Victorian aesthetic and punk rock attitude onto various forms of science-fiction cultureis a phenomenon that has come to influence film, literature, art, music, fashion, and more. The Steampunk Bible is the first compendium about the movement, tracing its roots in the works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells through its most recent expression in movies such as Sherlock Holmes. Its adherents celebrate the inventor as an artist and hero, re-envisioning and crafting retro technologies including antiquated airships and robots. A burgeoning DIY community has brought a distinctive Victorian-fantasy style to their crafts and art. Steampunk evokes a sense of adventure and discovery, and embraces extinct technologies as a way of talking about the future. This ultimate manual will appeal to aficionados and novices alike as author Jeff VanderMeer takes the reader on a wild ride through the clockwork corridors of Steampunk history.
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Synopsis
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 youve 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 hes made up a city called Ambergris, imagined its every last detail, and that hes 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.
About the Author
Jeff VanderMeer is a two-time World Fantasy Award winner whose books of fiction and edited anthologies have been finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award and the International Horror Guild Award.
Jeff VanderMeer on PowellsBooks.Blog
My latest book is
The Strange Bird, which exists in the universe of my novel
Borne. It’s my attempt to write from the perspective of a bird, although I cheat a bit since the bird is part human. The story follows the bird’s quest to be free, while encountering any number of obstacles...
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