From 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 youve ever visitedan 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 beheadingand finds himself enchanted. And a patient in a mental institution is convinced that hes made up a city called Ambergris, imagined its every last detail, and that hes 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 loseand findyourself again.