Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer’s first novel, Veniss Underground, takes readers on a journey to a labyrinthine city of tunnels, and the dangers lurking behind each turn.
Set in the mysterious and magical city of Veniss, a surreal metropolis that sits over an underground labyrinth of tunnels and mines. In this tale, epic and mythological in scope, VanderMeer takes the reader below the surface of the earth to the dark and decadent future. It’s a world where Living Artists craft works out of biological material, and humans are either tossed out or recycled into something wholly unrecognizable.
Told from three distinct viewpoints―Nicholas, a not-quite-talented-enough Artist; his twin sister, Nicola; and Nicola’s former lover, Shadrach―Veniss Underground follows these characters as they embark on a journey to hell and back, replete with the blend of horrors (biological, environmental, and ethical) that also animate VanderMeer’s subsequent blockbuster novels. Veniss Underground explores the limits of love, memory, and obsession in a landscape that defies the boundaries of imagination.
This reissue includes a new introduction by the National Book Award–winning author Charles Yu and more new material from Jeff VanderMeer.
Download and start listening now!
“VanderMeer’s first novel…set a template for much speculative strangeness to come…For all the grotesque, uncanny strangeness that VanderMeer conjures up, he doesn’t lose sight of the love story at its center…His audacity here is appealing.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
About Jeff VanderMeer
Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has appeared in the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales and in multiple anthologies. His recent books have made the year’s best books lists of Publishers Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, and Amazon.com. Annihilation won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a Paramount Pictures movie by Alex Garland, starring Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh. His other awards include World Fantasy Awards, Locus Award, Shirley Jackson Award, and the British Science Fiction Association award for nonfiction, France’s Le Cafard Cosmique, and Finland’s Tähtifantasia Award. He is the cofounder and assistant director of Shared Worlds, a unique fantasy and science fiction writing camp for teenagers.
About the Narrators
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
Emily Woo Zeller is an artist, actor, dancer, choreographer, and voice artist who has won Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration in 2018. She began her voice-over career by voicing animation in Asia. AudioFile magazine named her one of the Best Voices of 2013 for her work in Gulp. Other awards include the 2009 Tristen Award for Best Actress as Sally Bowles in Cabaret and the 2006 Roselyn E. Schneider Prize for Creative Achievement.
James Patterson is the most popular storyteller of our time. He is the creator of unforgettable characters and series, including Alex Cross, the Women’s Murder Club, Jane Effing Smith, and Maximum Ride, and of breathtaking true stories about the Kennedys, John Lennon, and Princess Diana, as well as our military heroes, police officers, and ER nurses. He has coauthored #1 bestselling novels with Bill Clinton and Dolly Parton, told the story of his own life in James Patterson by James Patterson, and received an Edgar Award, nine Emmy Awards, the Literarian Award from the National Book Foundation, and the National Humanities Medal.
Scott Brick, an acclaimed voice artist, screenwriter, and actor, has performed on film, television, and radio. He attended UCLA and spent ten years in a traveling Shakespeare company. Passionate about the spoken word, he has narrated a wide variety of audiobooks. winning won more than fifty AudioFile Earphones Awards and several of the prestigious Audie Awards. He was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine and the Voice of Choice for 2016 by Booklist magazine.