Serious review attention could break him out-though it will take a novel that makes some concessions to the marketplace to lure a major publisher. Locus On-Line as one of the 10 best short-story writers in the field, VanderMeer has avoided doing the kind of thing the big, increasingly commercial houses are willing to take on.

This beautifully written, virtually hallucinatory work isn't for every taste, but connoisseurs of the finest in postmodern fantasy will find it enormously rewarding. Other pieces take many forms, including a history of the city complete with footnotes, psychiatric records from a local hospital, an amazingly funny work of pseudo-biology entitled 'King Squid' and entirely bogus bibliographies and glossaries. Among the highlights are the World Fantasy Award–winning 'Transformation of Martin Lake,' the tale of a talented painter who's obsessed with a great composer 'The Strange Case of X,' which concerns an incarcerated lunatic found wandering the streets of Ambergris carrying the very book being discussed in this review the wonderful new story 'The Cage,' in which an antiques dealer becomes infected with a fungus that's slowly taking over much of the city and, oddest of all perhaps, an untitled short story, which fills the entire dust jacket and concerns an unnamed traveler who has a close encounter with a giant squid in the river that runs through Ambergris. City of Saints and Madmen From Jeff VanderMeer, the author of Borne and Annihilation, comes the paperback reissue of his cult classic City of Saints and. Set in the haunted city of Ambergris, with its Borges Bookstore, these stories feature bizarre recurring characters and intensely self-referential plots. 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.A master of postmodern game playing, VanderMeer ( The Exchange) here gathers all the fiction published in his earlier trade paper collection (also titled, in a typically Borgesian maneuver, City of Saints and Madmen), plus an equal amount of new material.

Readers worldwide have become increasingly beguiled by Jeff VanderMeer's strange and ancient metropolis. For anyone privileged to venture there, the name Ambergris conjures up one of the great and unforgettably fantastic cities of contemporary literature. 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. Once upon a time, on the banks of the River Moth, a city sprang up like no other in or out of history. The most complete updated edition of this fantastical excursion to an imaginary city.

Jeff vandermeer city of saints