Twenty Novels Concerning Cities as Expressions of the Fantastic

(Recently it occurred to me that many of the books that have endured in my imagination make the city an exhibition space for the fantastic or the irreal. Here are twenty of my favorites, listed alphabetically by author.)

 

  1. The Literary Conference by César Aira (the city as a failed experiment to clone Carlos Fuentes)

  2. The Other City by Michal Ajvaz (the city as an ordinary space suddenly unmasked as otherworldly by language)

  3. Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss (the city as an interstellar vessel subsumed by jungle)

  4. Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis (the city as an eerie Berlin haunted by the phantoms of history)

  5. Vermilion Sands by J. G. Ballard (the city as a decadent future art resort)

  6. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (the city as a multiplicity of other possible cities)

  7. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (the city as a labyrinthine fossil of human thought)

  8. The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis (the city as a membrane between this world and others)

  9. Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin (the city as New York but with flying horses)

  10. Uzumaki by Junji Ito (the city as a cursed space of horrifying spirals)

  11. Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy (the city as an inescapable modern Babel)

  12. The Facades by Eric Lundgren (the city as a Midwestern chain of mysteries and redirections)

  13. The City and the City by China Miéville (the city as two separate but interlocking realities)

  14. The Plains by Gerald Murnane (the city as a plain stitched together by libraries)

  15. The Inverted World by Christopher Priest (the city as an immense structure inching slowly along rails)

  16. Malacqua by Nicola Pugliese (the city as a place of endless and foreboding rains)

  17. The Dragon Griaule by Lucius Shepard (the city as an immense sleeping dragon)

  18. The Neighborhood by Gonçalo Tavares (the city as an assortment of famous minds at play)

  19. The Situation by Jeff VanderMeer (the city as a bioengineered surrealist corporate dystopia)

  20. Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët (the city as a dead girl filled with imps, sprites, and princesses)

— October 21, 2020


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