The Other City by Michal Ajvaz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Michal Ajvaz’s The Other City reminds me of Borges and Kafka of course, more distinctly though of Carter, Shulz, Kubin, and Lovecraft, but especially of Shulz and even of modern fantasists such as Mieville and Vandermeer. The book is a maze of shifting realities, beautiful and ominous images, and parodies of epic poetry, that is a fully enthralling and at times exhausting journey that skews from metaphysical slapstick comedy to psychedelic surrealism without much downtime. You don’t travel here for character development or any such furniture of fiction, this is not realism, and this is a book that forms its own reality.

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