City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer
City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer
3 Rating(s)
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City of Saints and Madmen

Author: Jeff VanderMeer

Narrator: Bronson Pinchot

Unabridged: 11 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/12/2022

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 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 has 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.

About Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has appeared in the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales and in multiple anthologies. His recent books have made the year’s best books lists of Publishers Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, and Amazon.com.

About Bronson Pinchot

Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.

Reviews

Goodreads review by J.G. Keely on March 23, 2018

Sometimes it doesn't matter what you hear about a book, all the promise described in glowing reviews--it doesn't matter who suggests it, on what authority or with what arguments. Sometimes, you're still going to come out the other side disappointed, confused how this could possibly be the book you h......more

Goodreads review by Ian on March 21, 2015

Some Fantastic Metafiction “City of Saints and Madmen” (“COSAM”) not only explores a world of New Weird author’s Jeff VanderMeer’s creation, it gives a detailed insight into the method of his creativity. It’s not just a fantasy novel, but a highly accessible and rewarding exercise in metafiction. It’s......more

Goodreads review by Traveller on October 02, 2013

Jeff VanderMeer is a self-proclaimed "New-Weird" writer. The New Weird genre as we see it in Vandermeer, started off with the works of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. A more modern example of another New-Weird author, would be China Miéville. Most people may know the first two auth......more

Goodreads review by Bradley on March 22, 2018

I would love to say this novel defies description, but it doesn't. :) In fact, thanks to the existence of a number of really quite fabulous works that came after it, some from VanderMeer's own hand, we can now properly place this work in its proper context. New Weird. Yeah, yeah, but WHAT DOES THIS ME......more

Goodreads review by Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) on November 24, 2020

Jeff VanderMeer is a very clever, very talented guy. But I feel that sometimes, he lets his cleverness get in the way of a good story. “City of Saints and Madmen” is his first visit to the city of Ambergris; a city unlike anything I can think of in the modern world, that plays mix and match with refe......more

Quotes

“This is fiction to stand alongside that of Calvino and Borges.” The Guardian (London)

“City of Saints and Madmen packs so much literary and emotional matter into the confines of one city…VanderMeer keeps going deeper and finding new forms of gold.” Locus

“Beautifully written, virtually hallucinatory work…Connoisseurs of the finest in postmodern fantasy will find it enormously rewarding.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“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’s what you’ve been looking for.” Michael Moorcock, winner of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award

“Somewhere at the intersection of pulp and surrealism, drawing on the very best of both traditions, is Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris. Unsettling, erudite, and shot through with unexpected humor…Ambergris is one of my favorite haunts in fiction.” China Mieville, author of The Last Days of New Paris

Awards

  • Le Cafard Cosmique Award
  • Finland's Tahtifantasia Award
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