City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer is a dazzling reinvention of the literature of the fantastic. This novel invites you to a place unlike any you’ve ever visited, delivered by one of the most audacious literary magicians.

Ambergris is a city of elegance and squalor, religious fervor and wanton lusts. Everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, an incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origin blooms.

In this city, 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 believes 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.