City of Saints and Madmen
Jeff VanderMeer
Random House Publishing Group
<p>In <b>City of Saints and Madmen</b>,  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. <br><br>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....<br><br>By turns sensuous and terrifying, filled with exotica and eroticism, this interwoven collection of stories,  histories, and "eyewitness" reports invokes a...</p></br></br></br></br>