It contained four novella-length pieces:ĭust jacket for the Prime Books edition, with art by Scott Eagle as well as a story. Considered a 'proto-Ambergris story' by the author, 'Learning to Leave the Flesh' wouldn't be included in the book until its 2004 edition.Ĭity of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris was first published in trade paperback format by Cosmos Books (an imprint of Wildside Press) in 2001. Although it does not reference the city directly, it mentions locations that would reappear in later work, such as Albumuth Boulevard and the River Moth. These creatures, though removed from the eccentricities of daily life in Ambergris, continue to cast a shadow over the city with their unexplained nocturnal activities.Īmbergris began in 1992 with 'Learning to Leave the Flesh', a short story conceived for the Clarion writers' workshop at Michigan State University. The stories of City of Saints and Madmen are set in Ambergris, an urban sprawl named for ' the most secret and valued part of the whale' and populated by humans after its original inhabitants-a race of mushroom-like humanoids known as 'gray caps'-were violently driven underground. The setting was further explored in the novels Shriek: An Afterword (2006) and Finch (2009).

īy 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.City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris is a collection of fantasy short stories by American writer Jeff VanderMeer, set in the fictional metropolis of Ambergris. 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. 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. 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.Ĭity of elegance and squalor.

From Jeff VanderMeer, the author of Borne and Annihilation, comes the paperback reissue of his cult classic City of Saints and Madmen.

Ambergris jeff vandermeer