The first two, City of Saints & Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword feature squid prominently. I wrote three books set in an imaginary city called Ambergris, now reprinted by MCD/FSG in one mammoth hardcover, aptly titled Ambergris. Squid also were a familiar element from a childhood growing up in the Fiji Islands. When I began to write fantasy inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Angela Carter, I fixated on squid and on fungi for this strangeness, which seemed to me a way of describing the odd beauty all around us, while also adding something unusual to the fiction. I’ve always loved squid-not in the culinary sense, but in the sense of a being that seems alien and conveys some sense of the vast wonder of Earth’s biosphere. Time enough has passed for the dull ache of hurt to have faded and a plate of calamari set before me not to trigger a deep sense of my own failings… Of those traumatic events surrounding the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, I must now finally write, dear reader.
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