About the Author\nJeff VanderMeer is the author of Dead Astronauts, Borne, and The Southern Reach Trilogy, the first volume of which, Annihilation, won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland starring Natalie Portman. VanderMeer speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, and their cats, plants, and bird feeders.\nFrom Jeff VanderMeer, the author of Borne and Annihilation, comes the paperback reissue of his cult classic City of Saints and Madmen. 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.\nCity 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 that he’s made up a city called Ambergris, imagined its every last detail, and that he’s really from a place called Chicago . . .\nBy 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 Ambergris Trilogy, 1)

Literature & Fiction

VanderMeer, Jeff

United States

Picador Paper

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.

City of Saints and Madmen

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fantasy

Spectra

World Fantasy Award Finalist for Best Collection. SF Site’s Book of the Year, Critics Choice. Locus Recommended Book. On Over 20 Year’s Best Lists, including Amazon.com and Publishers Weekly

Wildside Pr

From the vignette incorporated into the cover design to an encrypted story mischieviously embedded within the book and a major new novella, "The Cage", the deluxe hardcover version of City of Saints &amp; Madmen represents an innovative re-imagining of the original trade paperback (published in 2001). The 55,000 words of new material, work from seven artists, and the subtle but important revisions to the four main novellas, make the hardcover an entirely different book from the Locus-recommended trade paperback. 
City of Saints &amp; Madmen holds a number of unique pleasures for readers with a strong sense of play and literary adventure. At least two or three elements of the hardcover have rarely, if ever, been attempted before in fiction. 
"I like the idea of books as artifacts, a concept that sometimes slips away from us in this electronic era. I had a lot of fun putting this book together--working with artists, graphic designers, for example. The encrypted story turned out to be more involved than I thought it would be. The numbers in the encryption refer to words in the four main novellas. I quickly found that using an 'of' from one section of a novella created a different emotional resonance than from other sections. The reader who takes the time to decrypt the story will be rewarded by seeing both the decoded story and the four main novellas in a different light." 
Readers have been beguiled by VanderMeer's strange and ancient metropolis, a city that developed in the author's imagination almost by accident. "I never set out to create Ambergris - it just sort of happened. One night, I woke up at about midnight and suddenly had this image in my head of a busy street and a missionary looking up at a woman in a third-story window. I sat down and typed out the first few pages of Dradin, In Love. After I finished that piece, I realized the setting had infinite possibilities. I've been gratified by the response from readers and critics. And I've tried to build on the original novella and flesh out a complete setting while still retaining a sense of mystery." 
As Michael Moorcock writes in his introduction, "Examining VanderMeer, one is reminded of the glories of Angkor and Anudhapura combined with the bustle and swagger of Captain Conrad's Indonesia, the adventurous intrigues of Byzantium and Venice, the brutal Spice Wars of the Dutch. But sometimes it is as if Proust intrudes, insensed and reminiscent. VanderMeer describes a world so rich and exaggerated and full of mysterious life that it draws you away from any intended moral or pasquinade deep into the wealth of the world's womb." 
The "mysterious life" alluded to by Moorcock manifests itself most uniquely in the form of the gray caps or "mushroom dwellers," the indigenous race slaughtered and driven underground by the first settlers of Ambergris.This event, the subsequent retaliation, and the uneasy co-existence with dangerous subterranean neighbors, has shaped most all historical and social issues in Ambergris. 
"The thing that most intrigued me about Dradin, In Love, when I tried to distance myself from the text, was the presence of the gray caps. Who they are and how they fit in is something I've given a lot of thought to and will continue to explore even in the material I'm writing now." 
VanderMeer's work has appeared in ten languages in 17 countries, including in such magazines and an-thologies as Asimov's SF Magazine, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Interzone, The Third Alternative, Nebula Awards 30, Best New Horror 7, The Year's Best Fantastical Fiction, Infinity Plus: The Anthology, Dark Terrors, and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy 2001. Forthcoming books include the mass market paperback Veniss Underground, also from Prime, and the nonfiction collection Why Should I Cut Your Throat? from Cosmos. VanderMeer has also completed work as co-editor on two ambitious projects: Leviathan 3 (Ministry of Whimsy/ Prime) and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric &amp; Discredited Diseases (Chimeric). He is 33 years old and can be reached at vanderworld@hotmail.com.

Moorcock, Michael

Contemporary

Prime Books

Once upon a time, on the banks of the River Moth, a city sprang up like no other in or out of history. Founded on the blood of the original inhabitants after the defeat of the stealthy grey caps, and steeped for centuries in the aftermath of that struggle, Ambergris has become a cruelly beautiful metropolis - a haven for artists and thieves, for composers and murderers. For anyone privileged to venture there, the name Ambergris conjures up one of the great and unforgettably fantastic cities of contemporary literature. Readers worldwide have become increasingly beguiled by Jeff Vander Meer's strange and ancient metropolis. And for those who have once visited this uniquely complex and comprehensive society, it will remain forever a favourite haunt - a bustling, grotesque, magnificent, brilliantly realized community full of shocking and beautiful revelations. "City of Saints & Madmen" collects all of the Ambergris novellas (including the World Fantasy Award winner "The Transformation of Martin Lake").

Pan MacMillan

Once upon a time, on the banks of the River Moth, a city sprang up like no other in or out of history. Founded on the blood of the original inhabitants, the stealthy gray caps, and steeped for centuries in the aftermath of that struggle, Ambergris has become a cruelly beautiful metropolis--a haven for artists and thieves, for composers and murderers. City includes the World Fantasy Award-winning novella The Transformation of Martin Lake.

City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris

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Books by VanderMeer, Jeff

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by VanderMeer, Jeff. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

City of Saints and Madmen (The Ambergris Trilogy, 1)

City of Saints and Madmen

City of Saints and Madmen

City of Saints and Madmen

City of Saints and Madmen

City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris