City

From the Back Cover “Baricco has inventiveness in spades, and his freaks have the capacity to chill the blood or warm the heart.” -- Los Angeles Times Book Review“Filled with wild invention and lyrical prose . . . Conventional characters and superheroes alike behave with the wild abandon we have come to recognize in the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Don De Lillo and Robert Coover. City is simultaneously hilarious and profoundly sad.” -- TheWashington Post Book World“An imaginative, surprisingly poignant Italian reinvention of what has become a staple of American teen fiction: the saga of marginalized members of society who find comfort in each other.”-- Booklist“Along with flashes of love it reveals for old-fashioned storytelling, City boldly displays its futurist credentials…Baricco’s narrative virtuosity continues to astonish.” --The Independent (London) Product Description 'CITY is an important title for me, because it expresses what this book has always been in my head. A city. No particular city. An impression of a city rather. Its skeleton. I thought of the stories I had in mind as if they were neighbourhoods. And I imagined characters as if they were streets...The characters - the streets - are many. There is a barber who on Thursdays cuts hair for no charge, there is a giant, and a mute. There is a boy called Gould, and a girl called Shatzy Shell. There are professors, people who play football, a black kid who plays basketball and never fails to score, and there's also a general.' Alessandro Baricco Review "Baricco has inventiveness in spades, and his freaks have the capacity to chill the blood or warm the heart." -- "Los Angeles Times Book Review""Filled with wild invention and lyrical prose . . . Conventional characters and superheroes alike behave with the wild abandon we have come to recognize in the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Don De Lillo and Robert Coover. City is simultaneously hilarious and profoundly sad." "-- The""Washington Post Book World""An imaginative, surprisingly poignant Italian reinvention of what has become a staple of American teen fiction: the saga of marginalized members of society who find comfort in each other."-- "Booklist""Along with flashes of love it reveals for old-fashioned storytelling, City boldly displays its futurist credentials...Baricco's narrative virtuosity continues to astonish." "--The Independent" (London)"" From the Inside Flap The author of the international bestseller Silk now delivers a ravishing and wildly inventive novel about friendship, genius and its discontents, and the redemptive power of narrative. Somewhere in America lives a brilliant boy named Gould, an intellectual guided missile aimed at the Nobel Prize. His only companions are an imaginary giant and an imaginary mute. Improbably--and yet with impeccable logic--he falls into the care of Shatzy Shell, a young woman whose life up till that point has been equally devoid of human connection . Theirs is a relationship of stories and of stories within stories: of Gould's evolving saga of an underdog boxer and the violent Western that Shatzy has been dictating into a tape recorder since the age of six. Out of these stories, Alessandro Baricco creates a masterpiece of metaphysical pulp fiction that recalls both Scheherazade and Italo Calvino. By turns exhilarating and deeply moving, City is irresistible. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Prologue"So, Mr. Klauser, should Mami Jane die?""Screw them all.""Is that a yes or a no?""What do you think?"In October of 1987, CRB--the company that for twenty-two years had published the adventures of the mythical Ballon Mac--decided to take a poll of its readers to determine whether Mami Jane ought to die. Ballon Mac was a blind superhero who worked as a dentist by day and at night battled Evil, using the special powers of his saliva. Mami Jane was his mother. The readers were, in general, very fond of her: she collecte