{"product_id":"big-city-9781573660679","title":"Big City","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA fiction of the city as a chorus of voices, an entity that is both one and many.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003eMarream Krollos's \u003ci\u003eBig City \u003c\/i\u003eis a structurally innovative work of prose composed of vignettes, verse, dialogues, monologues, and short stories. Alone, they are fragments, but together they offer a glimpse of the human condition and form a harmonized narrative of desire, loneliness, and beauty. Through language that builds, destroys, and violates, Krollos maps the geography of our contemporary condition, a haunting meditation on human togetherness and isolation.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003eKrollos plays with the tension between the voice of the lonely “I” produced by the urban experience and the polyphony of the city itself. A city is a chorus and a collection of traces; it is a way of being with others and the concretization of the social divisions that keep people apart. As a lifelong city dweller, Krollos is obsessed with the way that cities shape our experiences of the world, our ideas about inside and outside and self and other.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003eBy mapping the emotional highs and lows of particular (though often anonymous) beings, the book creates a geography of the urban consciousness. The sensation of reading this lyric work of fiction is akin to how one experiences an attentive walk in an unknown city: one becomes attuned to the tenor of its many voices, how the languages lift and flourish, and how the micro and macro became integrally linked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBig City\u003c\/i\u003e by Marream Krollos is a stunning novel. By turns tender, strange, and fierce, it is always achingly honest, always surprising, and often, just when it needs to be, very funny. I thought of Italo Calvino, Roberto Bolaño, and Renee Gladman while I was reading it. I thought too of explorers and cartographers and strangers sleeping and waking and walking in sunlight. What beautiful, powerful writing this is.\"\" - Laird Hunt, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Evening Road\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eNeverhome\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"\"Marream Krollos's city is place of aloneness and longing. With an obsessive, unforgettable voice (and a rare intellectual rigor), Krollos explores the bottomless antipathy her city dwellers feel for themselves. \u003ci\u003eBig City\u003c\/i\u003e is an amazing and ferocious book.\"\" - Brian Kiteley, author of \u003ci\u003eStill Life with Insects \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe River Gods\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\"Lonely, menaced, loveless, longing, people sing the city into existence. They ‘squawk and squirt words'; they 'spit on every inch of this concrete.' Reading Marream Krollos is ‘to withdraw amongst many,' to become anonymous and personal, to hear voices that contain ‘all forms of palpable weather.' Read her. Every building in \u003ci\u003eBig City\u003c\/i\u003e opens up into a bridge that is a sentence that reaches from one body toward another: a plea, a threat, an offering.\"\" - Joanna Ruocco, author of \u003ci\u003eAnother Governess\/The Least Blacksmith\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"The University of Alabama Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51041444561239,"sku":"9781573660679","price":16.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781573660679.jpg?v=1750950304","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/big-city-9781573660679","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}