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.

Listening Length

11 hours and 55 minutes
Author

Jeff VanderMeer
Narrator

Bronson Pinchot
Audible release date

January 11, 2022
Language

English
Publisher

Blackstone Publishing
ASIN

B085WBQJM9
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	11 hours and 55 minutes
Author	Jeff VanderMeer
Narrator	Bronson Pinchot
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	January 11, 2022
Publisher	Blackstone Publishing
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B085WBQJM9
Best Sellers Rank	#52,799 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #150 in Science Fiction Anthologies & Short Stories #868 in Science Fiction Anthologies (Books) #1,491 in Paranormal Fantasy

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4.4 out of 5

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J. W. Kennedy

Bizarre and Intricate

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 20, 2011

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Prankish, witty, absurd and horrifying. This book is a collection of mostly previously-published material gathered together in a single volume, all about the imaginary city of Ambergris. The various items are interlocking, cross-referential, and together they build up a mythology, a history, a culture of this vividly conceived fantasy world. The first half, "The Book of Ambergris" contains four novellas:

"Dradin, In Love" is a surreal tale about a missionary returning from the jungle, becoming obsessed with a woman he sees in a window, and enlisting the aid of a reprehensible dwarf to help him woo her. The story spirals into madness and an alarming degree of violence. Themes introduced here recur in other stories throughout the book (dwarves seem to be an obsession, along with squid and fungus), as well as a surprising revelation as to who the narrator actually is...
"The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris" is exactly what the title implies - a history of Ambergris written by Duncan Shriek (who turns out to be important in the novel _Finch_ .. which I read first.) It is filled with snarky & hilarious footnotes which hint at another story which the author knows but is not telling...
"The Transformation of Martin Lake" tells an eerie story of events surrounding the death of the great Ambergris composer Voss Bender as they relate to a painter named Martin Lake. The story is interspersed with excerpts from an art-historical/critical essay about Lake's paintings, written by gallery curator Janice Shriek (sister of historian Duncan Shriek.) VanderMeer's ability to ape the art-historian's academic writing style is impressive.
"The Strange Case of X" is an internally self-referential story narrated in first and third person (by the same character) about a writer imprisoned within his own fictional world.

The second half of the book is the "AppendiX" which contains an assortment of short stories, notes, letters and pamphlets (including a glossary of Ambergris and a hilarious treatise on the subject of giant freshwater squid) supposedly left behind by X sometime after the events described in "The Strange Case of X." By turns funny and gruesome, these collected fragments build up the mythology of Ambergris.

Rarely have I seen an imaginary world so completely and meticulously conceived. Most are only as detailed as the immediate story requires, so I had no idea Ambergris had this much legitimate depth to it. Having read _Finch_ first (and therefore already knowing what the fungoid "gray caps" are planning) did not diminish my enjoyment. In fact, probably knowing that there was a point to all of this increased my enjoyment. Otherwise what we have here is an extended exercise in world-building. The stories, taken individually, are interesting .. cumulatively they are impressive .. but in a narrative sense they lead nowhere. This book lays the groundwork for the subsequent Ambergris novels, _Shriek: An Afterword_ and _Finch_. In itself, considering its nature as a collection of short works, it has no overarching plot - which may frustrate some readers. But there are threads that tie all of this material together.

VanderMeer is a chameleon, able to mimic a variety of literary voices & styles. This book is a veritable puzzle-box full of clever tricks, self-referential pranks and hoaxery, vivid description and narrative irony .. His prose sparkles, giving the impression of complete control while leaving much to deduce & infer. _City of Saints and Madmen_ requires some patience from the reader but I found it immensely rewarding. Seldom do I find a book both witty AND disturbing. I will count it among my favorites from now on.

3 people found this helpful

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Carey C. Newhouse

The haunting, believable city of Ambergris

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 12, 2012

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I first heard about this book in 2006, my freshman year in college. After ordering China Mieville's excellent collection, Looking for Jake: Stories , Amazon recommended City of Saints and Madmen to me.

It wasn't until two years later that, finding myself at a low point, I finally picked it up.

I must say, you can't do much better for escapism than the exquisitely rendered city setting of this book. In this collection, Jeff Vandermeer writes the history of Ambergris through the vaguely intertwined stories within.

The stories are beautifully written and stand perfectly well on their own, but as a collection, they highlight the hauntingly believable city. Landmarks and cultural figures are casually strewn throughout, and the way they seem so natural is one of the reasons the city comes so thoroughly to life. Vandermeer manages to insert them in a way that is effortless and imparts part of the cultural experience of Ambergris to the reader without forcing it. For example, in the first story, "Dradin, In Love," the main character notices a Voss Bender piece being played. Throughout the stories, it becomes clear that Voss Bender is Ambergris's most beloved composer and cultural icon. This knowledge is imparted in such a way that when a later character comes face-to-face with the esteemed composer, my first reaction was to be a bit star-struck and shocked. I had seen this sort of realization attempted by other authors in the past, but this is the first time that it didn't feel like a gimmick.

It is the same with the mysterious others inhabiting the city, the fungal Graycaps. They are introduced as merely part of city life in the first story. The second story, "The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris" is exactly what it says on the tin, and brings to light the crucial mystery of the Graycaps to the city's past and future. As the book winds on, they take on an implacably ominous tone, although their appearances are seldom even tenuously connected to the conflict at hand.

The characters are rich and have unique voices (even Duncan Shriek, the author to whom the Hoegbotton Guide is attributed, comes to life through his numerous footnotes). The fact that the writing seems drastically different from one story to the next, and that many of the works are attributed to characters within the world makes the book all the more immersive. Of course, the most important character is the city itself. The other two books in the Ambergris cycle, Shriek: An Afterword and Finch , tell the rest of the city's story, and are also well worth reading.

I'm beginning to ramble. The quick and dirty: the star of the show is the city of Ambergris, which Vandermeer expertly brings to life. The setting is a strange one, yet it comes through the book as naturally as our own world comes in contemporary fiction. It is truly one of my most treasured books. Buy it or borrow it, but find a way to read this gem.

7 people found this helpful

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John Fletcher

Miéville Lite

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 22, 2018

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The mention early in City of Saints and Madmen of the Borges Bookshop (it occurs a number of times later) is a pretty clear signal of how the author wants us to take his book:half gothic fantasy, half post-modernist deconstruction of the concept of a book itself. Individually, each of these is quite successful, especially the witty mixture of styles, typefaces and formats that characterise the different pieces, and the way in which the various texts comment on each other. But it has to be said that in the end the different bits don't always go together that well, and there are deliberate echoes of Miéville, as well as Harrison's Virconium, which actually serve to remind us that both of these writers are actually rather better. In the end, it's too uneven and bitty to be fully convincing.

5 people found this helpful

Lee Baxter

Admirable world building...but far too dense

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 7, 2019

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I admire the originality and world creation Vandermeer has attempted here but I was simply not invested and it was very dense to read. These were not simple short stories like I was expecting but included travel guides, history texts and for a world you're not invested in..makes for difficult reading

2 people found this helpful

Graham Godfrey

Dreadful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 27, 2018

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Very poor book, written by someone trying to copy the style and create the myths which others have done many times better. A waste of time

Mike

Is it a really frustrating, good book or a really good, frustrating book?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 12, 2010

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By turns this book has delighted and annoyed me, which has compelled me to write this to try to understand why I have had this response.

The first story is a delight, beautifully written and it slowly introduces the reader to the unusual city that is Ambergris. The story is that of an outsider who falls in love with a woman in a window, and the way that he tries to get her to notice him and reciprocate his love, against a backdrop of a very strange culture.

The second is the story of the origins of the city, written long after the event, with numerous footnotes and scathing comments about the interpretations put on events by the writer's fellow academics/competitors. This is where the mushroom dwellers role in Ambergris is considered, although even so they remain a shady presence.

The third story is the story of a painting, told through the story of the artist from different sources. Each source seems to have a slightly more or less accurate appreciation of the actual events, as revealed by the central narrative. Another outsider, a struggling artist, who is unwittingly pulled centre stage. The story is a little slow to unwind but has some beautiful images within it.

The final story explores the potential links between our real world of Chicago and the imaginary world of Ambergris, through the interrogation of X. I found this the least satisfactory of the four stories, perhaps because there was less room for the delights of Vandermeer's writing, and perhaps because after a little while the outcome becomes rather predictable.

And then there is the AppendiX, which are the writings that X has in his possession in the fourth story. Some of them are interesting and humorous, but parts are rather self-indulgent; do we really need an annotated bibliography of writings about the King Squid that goes on for twenty-odd pages. It's a generalisation I know, but when a book suddenly starts using different fonts I think that it's a bit of a danger signal. There are different fonts and page borders aplenty in the AppendiX.

The frustration comes because each piece of work opens a tiny window onto the big picture that is Ambergris, but ultimately all you have are several tiny windows showing certain aspects in greater or lesser detail, but the full picture remains hidden. Imagine a vast picture over which someone has positioned an advent calendar. Each story opens a window, but by the time you've finished the book you have only revealed a tiny fraction of the picture.

So I suppose what I'm saying is that I want more about Ambergris, I want to know more about the people who live and work there, not just a few outsiders and fanatics. I want to hear about different areas, different roads, the harbour and the government.

I suppose that this would have been an absolutely cracking third or fourth book about Ambergris, had the earlier books put the basic city in place. Since those earlier books don't exist it is really frustrating. But it is also really good.

Update - I have now discovered Shriek: An Afterword and Finch which are set in Ambergris and follow on from this collection of stories. Finch especially is an intriguing cocktail of a book, but I haven't finished Shriek yet. Reviews will follow in the respective places.

6 people found this helpful

tetrapanax

Weird and wonderful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 6, 2016

Verified Purchase

Typical VanderMeer, excellent

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