Why read City of Saints and Madmen?

Book cover of City of Saints and Madmen

Book description

From the author of Annihilation, now a major motion picture on Netflix.

From Jeff VanderMeer, an author praised by writers such as Laren Beukes, China Mieville and Michael Moorcock, City of Saints and Madmen is by turns sensuous and terrifying. This collection of four linked novellas is the perfect introduction…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked City of Saints and Madmen as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Noah Lemelson

Author

If dragons and elves are the mainstays of traditional fantasy, then mushrooms and squids are the mainstays of weird fantasy. And there’s no city with more squids or mushrooms than Vandermeer’s Ambergris. A haphazard port town infested by fungi and built on ancient ruins holding dark secrets, there’s nothing quite like Ambergris.

What I love so much about Vandermeer’s trilogy is that the city evolves and changes. City of Saints and Madmen is an excellent short story collection that introduces the setting in peacetime, and by the end of Finch it has seen so much conflict and upheaval that Ambergris…

From Noah's list on fantasy about weird and wonderful cities.

Stephanie Feldman

Author

Over a decade before VanderMeer gave us the weird wilderness of Annihilation, he published the City of Saints and Madmen, the first in his trilogy about the city of Ambergris. This collection of stories, notes, and (fictional) histories invites us into a city of gray-capped mushroomanoids; squid festivals and cults; and fanatical historians. I love this book for its many approaches to describing a city, and how every new detail electrifies Ambergris’s atmosphere and deepens its mystery.

From Stephanie's list on fantastical cities.