#have you read a stranger in olondria?

[frigidwife]

good morning, do you have any book or poetry recommendations… i trust your taste

off top of my head!

gothic

wuthering heights

villette

frankenstein

rebecca

the haunting of hill house

we have always lived in the castle (+ companion film ginger snaps)

sci fi/fantasy

the farthest shore

the left hand of darkness

annihilation by jeff vandermeer

a stranger in olondria by sofia samatar

literary fiction(?)

giovanni's room if u want permanent emotional damage

mrs dalloway + the waves + to the lighthouse

kitchen by banana yoshimoto

lucy by jamaica kincaid

in another place, not here by dionne brand - please read this novel

[sentience-if]

Things Sentience reminds me of:

- Blade Runner (the first movie only)

- the game "Primordia"

- "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"

- the album "Dead Cities" by The Future Sound of London

- that time in high school I read "House of Leaves" too many times in a row and then in very minor ways some really weird shit started happening around me

- just a wee dash of "The Abhorsen Series" by Garth Nix

- a smidge of "Strangers in Olondria" by Sofia Samatar

As an ex-religious person who grew up in a high liturgical setting, was obsessed with everything sci fi, and who has maintained an extreme affection for the saints + medieval mysticism a la Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, your story is my catnip! Thank you for writing it.

Signed,

Faithful Rat #712

I've read Abhorsen and I Have No Mouth, and seen Blade Runner. House of Leaves is on my list but I'm... afraid lol. Will definitely be looking into the rest of these :)

you 🤝 me

religion brain worms

[librarycards]

3, 4, 12, 19 for the book ask game!

What were your top five books of the year?

You'll have to wait a few more days for the list as I make my final quarterly book recs post for this year :3

In the meantime, check my list below for some that I loved from new-to-me authors.

Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?

Yes! Here are a few:

Atef Abu Saif, via The Drone Eats With Me (crucial reading in your Palestine education, too)

Zeyn Joukhadar, via The Thirty Names of Night

Poupeh Missaghi, via trans(re)lating house one

Shelley Parker-Chan, via She Who Became the Sun

Joe Hill, via NOS4ATU

Mairead Case, via See You in the Morning and Tiny, both published by featherproof books (the press publishing my novel next year!)

Micha Frazer-Carroll, via Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health

Sofia Samatar, via A Stranger in Olondria

Gloria Susana Esquivel, via Animals at the End of the World

Emily Pettit, via Blue Flame

Cindy Crabb, via Doris: An Anthology

Kwon Yeo-Sun, via Lemon

Robin Coste-Lewis, via Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems

ooooops that's more than a few. hope you find something there that interests you!

Any books that disappointed you?

Answered already, but another that disappointed me was The Dissolving Classroom by Junji Ito. I'm a huge fan of most of his work, and was excited to engage with a work influenced by Kazuo Umezz, a mangaka Ito admires and whose series, The Drifting Classroom, I love.

Alas, this Ito manga was thin on plot and character development and generally Not Good.

Did you use your library?

Of course! I use my university library/ILL, as well as my current local + hometown local library via Overdrive/Libby/Kanopy :)

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

[devoutjunk]

currently reading

A Stranger in Olondria (Sofia Samatar)

gorgeous prose, rival religious cults, political intrigue, books within books, lush & labyrinthine cities, angels not as forces of salvation but as the dead come back for their revenge, and caught up within it all, Jevick, a young man far from home, driven on a quest he doesn’t want by a dead girl he hardly knew

The Corner that Held Them (Sylvia Townsend Warner)

a sprawling novel about a “Benedictine convent of no great note” that winds through several decades at Oby with the unending ever shifting current of the stream that marks the boundary of their land, shifting between the minds of its varied cast with ease. it doesn’t seem like it would be gripping reading—the petty grudges and predictable woes of the nuns and their village—but Warner somehow makes that dailiness transcendent, poignant, and darkly funny

Powers and Thrones (Dan Jones)

A history of the Middle Ages. Good so far as a kind of general overview that gives you a sense of the wider political and cultural currents/a sense of the motion of history. As always I crave details about the people themselves but I know this is somewhat limited by the subject matter and source material (Stacy Schiff manages it w/ Cleopatra though!!). Author loves to compare like, Byzantine chariot riots over the nature of Christ to 90s British football club antics regardless of how relevant the comparison is. which could get annoying but I’m choosing to find it amusing (I can’t help be charmed when someone’s own obsessions are clearly creeping into the work). He admits a bias towards/focus on “the west” in his intro and after reading the section on the various Islamic empires of the 600s I’d agree with his assessment. He tries to give everything its due but I have a feeling his interest lies more w/ post-Roman Britain so I’m curious to see if those chapters are more detailed

[y6le]

wait whoever already voted can you vote in this one now instead please and thank you

[janesmitish]

The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly? - No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there - the end of the books. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields.

Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. You look up. It's a room in an old house. Or perhaps it's a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you've been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Life comes back, the shadows of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it's merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate. - A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar

[tanadrin]

under a cut because long, disorganized, self-indulgent

ok so the Lende Empire isn’t really feudal; I despise feudal stasis in fantasy, like even the shortest timeline puts the Andal invasion at more than 2,000 ybp in Game of Thrones, you really think in all that time everybody on the continent is dumb enough to not invent a better plough? or glass just good enough to grind lenses? or make small improvements in windmill design? and all that shit adds up and BAM before you know it, you've got metallurgy good enough to make a steam engine with, so no matter what BS magical physics you come up with, if things work at the human scale even remotely like they do in our world, your age of knights and castles and dragons not having to contend with antiaircraft guns has a limited shelf-life.

(and that's interesting! And more people--by which i mean people besides Terry Pratchett, who did this wonderfully--should write about high fantasy worlds before they reached Medieval Stasis Mode, and after they left it! I would fukkin kill to read a good high fantasy book that also had, like spaceships in it. Insofar as genre conventions have evolved not according to the internal logic of the worlds they depict but according to how and for what reason they serve as commentaries on specific aspects of our own world and its history, and are aimed at evoking certain emotions, it's understandable why such generic mishsmashes are relatively uncommon. But people also definitely read speculative fiction because they like internally cohesive worlds very different from our own, so it is my fondest hope that this sort of thing becomes more popular going forward)

(you can of course also have fantasy worlds which are *not* very much like our own world at human scale. Greg Egan actually does this in a science fiction mode, but as long as you're positing a world where dimensions of space are hyperbolic like time or where humans change sex every time they have sex because trading a detachable symbiotic penis is part of having an orgasm, whether you call this stuff "different science" or "magic" is really beside the point. I have an idea I've been batting around for a while about a world divided, like Evan Dahm's Overside, or the two parallel worlds in Fringe, except part of the division is not just physical, but metaphysical. Morality itself in each subworld is defective, because each subworld got a different part of a morally and metaphysically unified whole: thus, for reasons nobody can understand, almost every ethical system derived by people resident in only one subworld is deeply defective, and would be horrifying to us--as though, perhaps, our own complex and nuanced moral landscape that we wrestle with was a kind of grand unified theory whose symmetry had been broken, and which was only understood piecemeal, as totally separate concepts. And of course, if you live in one subworld everyone from the other subworld is a horrifying monster whose morality is totally incomprehensible to you, so you reflexively treat them as an enemy.)

History isn't just one thing after another. I mean, okay, it is, but it's *also* the aftereffects of those things, the things that stick around forever and can't be gotten away from. And just like how if you want to understand our own world you need to look at what it was like five years ago, and to understand what it was like five years ago you need to look at what it was like ten years ago, and fifteen, ad nauseam, until you're suddenly back at World War II, or the Holy Roman Empire, or Sumer, or struggling through the ever-increasing fog of a steadily more ambiguous archeological record, well, this is as true for politics and language as it is the material aspects of society. In the same way maps feel insufficient when the artist doesn't think about what's beyond the edge of the page (not to knock on GRRM too much, but if you put all the continents and seas in his world on the same map, you notice they're all really... rectangular. Like he drew them to fit individual pieces of paper. Rivers and island arcs get compressed when they near a margin. Seas are just voids. Nothing ever has to be moved to a little box in a corner to fit. there's no attempt at verisimilitude), I think invented worlds feel insufficient when the writer asks you to take them seriously as a reflection of our own, or an aspect of our own, but neglects to at least suggest their place in a larger whole.

I wanted with the Lende Empire to have something that still let me have a lot of early centuries of sword-and-horse style adventures (because i started writing about Lende when I was thirteen and had just finished the Silmarillion for the second time), and I wanted when writing its history to still be able to take big chunks of story I stole from Norse legends and medieval poetry and dump them almost whole into the setting, but I also wanted the history not to read like a fantasy history--or not just a fantasy history. What I mean is, when you read something like the Silmarillion, or when a character in a fantasy world relates some legend to you, even if it's referred to as an old and ambiguous tale, you still often feel like that's really what happened. Like, for me, one of the chief emotional attractions to something like the tales of the wars of the Goths and Huns, or Beowulf's description of Migration Age Denmark filtered through Anglo-Saxon poetic tropes, or the Icelandic family sagas, is that we really have a hard time knowing how much of it is true, how much of its is plausible embellishment, and how much of it is anachronistic nonsense or pure bullshit. Is the Njala based on a faithfully recounted tradition passed down orally for a few hundred years? Who knows! Not us. We know a guy named Njal got burned in his house around 1000 AD, but much of the mystery and the poignancy of stories like that for me lies in the difficulty of ascertaining their relationship to the truth.

What I want(ed) was something that when you read it made you think "ok, obviously the narrator is trying their best, but even they don't know exactly what the fuck happened; this is probably one third ambiguous tradition, one third solid, one third bullshit." So the Chronicle of Lende has some stuff in it that's intentionally difficult to reconcile. It has weird tonal shifts. The first third owes a lot to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the sagas and the Hildebrantslied; the middle is closer to the Silmarillion, or the history of Rome when told more from the Great Man perspective than the Impersonal Forces one, and the last third starts out that way but goes some weird places and veers off at the end to what is obviously a symbolic and highly abstracted mode of narration which, in relating the destruction of the Empire imitates the way in which its beginning is related (for in-universe Thematic Reasons), *but* while all this is going on, the hope is that the reader is *also* able to glimpse through these ambiguities and stylistic quirks, and incompatibilities, and weird digressions involving talking animals or the spirit world, a society that's undergoing familiar demographic and social and technological transitions: moving from oral culture agrarianism to the beginnings of a real urban civilization, with a centralized state and the written word, and like Western Europe having to figure out a social structure in the absence of any good nearby imperial models (they end up with something more like fraternal warrior societies being deputized to control land rather than feudal lords, but the essential logic is the same); but then moving to a real model of administrative statehood, as infrastructure and technology improve, before industrialization kicks off, the population explodes, social tensions inherent in that begin tearing at the seams of society, and the horrors of industrialized warfare are unleashed.

There are meant to be striking differences, too, of course. Lende history is only about a thousand Earth years long, and it's confined mostly to the western side of a continent split by a huge, Himalayan-like mountain range. Its rapid rise and increase in technological sophistication are due to exogenous factors (genuine divine intervention in some cases), and equally even the True Secret History of the empire's destruction has no real-world parallels, at least not since the Channeled Scablands formed 14,000 years ago. It's also teeeechnically science fiction and not fantasy, though that distinction really rests on tone and not on setting IMO. But I don't think it's possible to tell what feels like a real history of a world without sometimes radically changing genres: our own history goes from dry science (geology, paleontology, archeology) to legend and myth and scripture, to dusty old classical history and books penned by ancients who sometimes have startlingly different notions about what merits mention in a story and how to tell one, to tales of kings and queens and conquerors, before emerging blinking in the sunlight of dry matter of fact narration again. I have always believed conventions, including those of genre and style, should be tools and not straightjackets. The best worldbuilding literature I have read steals from a huge variety of sources (and Pratchett deserves a mention here again, alongside Susanna Clarke, and Ada Palmer, and the people who wrote the Elder Scrolls backstory, and Sofia Samatar, and Angelica Gorodischer).

[mssarahmorgan]

Book 24 of 2022: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin

This book is so quietly revolutionary. The hero goes on an epic journey, not to make a name for himself, win something, or fight someone, but to undo something terrible he did out of youthful pride. And the prose! It is just so beautiful. Incantatory. This is one of those books that reveals something new to you every time you read it - read it if you haven't, re-read it if you have.

What to read next: Who compares with Ursula? Nobody, it's impossible. But if you want some more journeying vibes & intense love of story, check out A Stranger in Olondria, by Sofia Samatar.

[pomea]

"Let me tell you about old men. Our appetites grow like vines—like the hectic plants of the desert, which bear only flowers and have no leaves. You have never seen a desert. Have you not read Firdred of Bain? 'The earth has a thousand thirsty tongues.' That is what old age is like."

sofia samatar, a stranger in olondria

[shanhelingmoving]

tagged by @valinorbound​ thankyou!! <3

3 ships: ahhh my problem with ships is that....as soon as i’m over a thing i’m Over if you know what i mean (so ig it’s time for book ships)

Miles/Tristan - Witchmark

Red/Blue - This Is How You Lose The Time War

Sharon/Rhys - Magicals Anonymous (when I read the first book i was like....hm not feeling this... but the more i think about it the more i like it)

Last song: She Looks Like Fun - Arctic Monkeys

Last Movie: The Old Guard

Currently reading: A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar 

Currently watching: She-Ra with my sister! we have been watching gay cartoons together it has been nice

Currently consuming: .......you know that feeling when your mind eats you alive and it will not shut up

Currently craving: i want to go stab someone :’( let me stab someone again :’) (this is a fencing post)

tagging @peter-hughes-harmonies @shejustcalledmeafish @chimera5xg

[whilereadingandwalking]

I Should Have Read That - A Tag

Thank you for the tag, @deadpoetsmusings! and thanks to the creator of this tag, booksnest.

A book that a certain friend is always telling you to read: Ones that I’ve neglected to pick up that have been recommended include A Stranger in Olondria by Samatar and the Temeraire series by Novik. Both are on the list, I just haven’t purchased them yet, and the to-read list is very long.

A book that’s been on your TBR forever and yet you still haven’t picked it up: The Glass Castle. Secretariat. The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories. I’m doing better with my TBR this year, but it’s still quite full.

A book in a series you’ve started, but haven’t finished yet: The Bear and the Nightingale. Really enjoyed that first book from Katherine Arden, but never quite got around to buying the next two in the trilogy.

A classic you’ve always liked the sound of, but never actually read: I have a few classics on my TBR shelf that I haven’t read, including The 13 Clocks by Thurber, Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence, Sister Outsider by Lorde, and The Portrait of a Lady by James. To expand, some classics that are not even yet on my TBR shelf but which I would like to read include: The Yellow Wallpaper, Assata: An Autobiography, and Wide Sargasso Sea. And I really, really need to start reading James Baldwin.

A popular book that it seems everyone but you has read: A lot of the ones that come through Book of the Month. Also a lot of YA adaptations. I don’t read much YA partially because it’s expensive but then I read each book in like a day, so I’m less inclined to invest.

A book that inspired a film/TV adaptation that you really love, but you just haven’t read it yet: Oh, there are many. I’ll often try and read the book first if I’ve read good things. There are many YAs that this applies to however: Dumplin’, Simon vs. Homo Sapiens Agenda, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.

A book you see all over Instagram Tumblr (I don’t use Instagram) but haven’t picked up yet: The Hazel Wood. 

[mystical-dark-passenger]

“The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly? - No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there - the end of the books. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields. Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. You look up. It's a room in an old house. Or perhaps it's a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you've been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Life comes back, the shadows of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it's merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate.”

― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

[rhetoricandlogic]

2017′s (almost) over, here’s what I read

My top-10(ish) list goes into a separate post because this one’s long enough already.

The Mechanical - Ian Tregillis

The Rising - Ian Tregillis

Liberation - Ian Tregillis

Sultana’s Dream - Rokheya Shekkawat Hossein

Between Two Thorns - Emma Newman

Any Other Name - Emma Newman

All is Fair - Emma Newman

A Closed and Common Orbit - Becky Chambers

A Caffeinated Collection of Curious Accounts - Catelyn Winona

They’re Made Out of Meat - Terry Bisson

That Game We Played During the War -  Carry Vaughn

Cast Under an Alien Sun (Destiny’s Crucible #1) - Olan Thorensen

The Pen and the Sword (Destiny’s Crucible #2) - Olan Thorensen

The Death of Me (Johannes Cabal) - Jonathan L. Howard

Sandman Slim - Richard Kadrey

Arcanum Unbounded - Brandon Sanderson

Castle Hangnail - Ursula Vernon

You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay - Alyssa Wong

The 13 ½ Lives of Captain Blue Bear - Walter Moers

Euphoria - Lily King

Fox 8: A Story - George Saunders

The Crystal Singer - Anne McCaffrey

The Grace of Kings - Ken Liu

The Wall of Storms - Ken Liu

Laurus - Eugene Vodolazkin

Ysabel - Guy Gavriel Kay

Nigerians in Space - Deji Bryce Olukotun

Forging Hephaestus - Drew Hayes

Brother’s Ruin - Emma Newmann

Sabriel - Garth Nix

Lirael - Garth Nix

Abhorsen - Garth Nix

The Traitor Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson

Three Parts Dead - Max Gladstone

Two Serpents Rise - Max Gladstone

Full Fathom Five - Max Gladstone

Four Roads Cross - Max Gladstone

Last First Snow - Max Gladstone

Ancient Ruins - Benjamin Medrano

All Systems Red - Martha Wells

Contact - Carl Sagan

Clariel - Garth Nix

Assassin’s Fate - Robin Hobb

Way of Kings - Brandon Sanderson (re-read)

The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn - Usman Malik

The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller

Everything Alyssa Wong

A Climbing Stock - Andrew Hiller

Wild Magic - Tamora Pierce

Fingersmith - Sarah Waters

City of Miracles - Robert Jackson Bennett

Sleeping Giants - Sylvain Neuvel

Waking Gods - Sylvain Neuvel

When Gravity Fails - George Alec Effinger

A Little Knowledge - Emma Newman

All Good Things - Emma Newman

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making - Catherynne M. Valente

The Raven Stratagem - Yoon Ha Lee

City of Bones - Martha Wells

Mightier Than The Sword - K. J. Parker

The Two of Swords (part 1-15) - K. J. Parker (re-read)

Words of Radiance - Brandon Sanderson (re-read)

Downfall of the Gods - K. J. Parker

Those Above - Daniel Polanski (DNF)

The Boy on the Bridge - Mike Carey

A Stranger in Olondria - Sofia Samatar

The North Water - Ian McGuire

The Heart Of What Was Lost - Tad Williams

The Witchwood Crown - Tad Williams

Child of an Ancient City - Tad Williams (re-read)

Borne - Jeff VanderMeer 

Noumenon - Marina J. Loststetter

The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead

Infomocracy - Malka Older

Revelation Space - Alastair Reynolds

World War Z - Max Brooks

Minecraft The Island - Max Brooks

The Castle of Crossed Destinies - Italo Calvino

The Rift - Nina Alexander

The Two of Swords 16 - K.J. Parker

The Ruin of Angels - Max Gladstone

The Two of Swords 17 - K.J. Parker

Too Like The Lightning - Ada Palmer

Seven Surrenders - Ada Palmer

The Two of Swords 18 - K.J. Parker

The Two of Swords 19 - K.J. Parker

All The Birds in the Sky - Charlie Jane Anders

The Black Tides of Heaven - Jy Yang

The Red Threads of Fortune - Jy Yang

Provenance - Ann Leckie

Under The Pendulum Sun - Jeanette Ng

Sea of Rust - C. Robert Cargill

Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Have a Nemesis - Richard Roberts

A Long Day in Lychford - Paul Cornell

The Screaming Staircase - Jonathan Stroud

The Whispering Skull - Jonathan Stroud

The Hollow Boy - Jonathan Stroud

The Creeping Shadow - Jonathan Stroud

The Dagger in The Desk - Jonathan Stroud

The Whispering Skull - Jonathan Stroud

The Hollow Boy - Jonathan Stroud

The Creeping Shadow - Jonathan Stroud

The Mouse in the Manor House - Sam Garland

Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikowsky

What the Hell Did I Just Read - David Wong

Oathbringer - Brandon Sanderson - 3 times, 1 read, 2 audio

A Skinful of Shadows - Frances Hardinge

Sewer, Gas, Electric: The Public Works Trilogy - Matt Ruff

Autonomous - Annalee Newitz

The Will to Battle - Ada Palmer

and a whole tank full of short fiction one can find online. I’m not going to make this post any longer by mentioning them all - some I linked in my #short story tag - if you want to point me to others and/or discuss any short story you find online for free, hmu - I’m always up for new stories and discussion.

The top-10 post will have to wait a couple of days - I might not be around much for the next several days, so:

For the coming year, I wish you’ll all find the thing most important to you! 

[kraken-spines]

2, 5 and 9 for the book asks :D

2. Top 5 Books of all time

Agh this is hard. I’ll probably forget something. But the first five “favorites that come to mind are below”

 Frankenstein by Mary Shelly

 Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Greene

 Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake

 A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar 

N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy

5. where do you buy books?

Nowhere hopefully this year! I’m trying to cut back on book purchases because I don’t have the space but also have a lot of books that should be read. But normally they’re second hand from places like thriftbooks.com, used bookstores, or library sales. If it’s a brand new book or an indie book then I go to amazon.

9. when do you tend to read most?

Early morning or late at night. There is no middle ground. :P

Thanks for the ask anon! 

[evandahm]

Hi here’s another list of things I’ve read that are really important to me, on the loose theme of ‘fantasy urbanism.’ I still haven’t read Dhalgren.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. This is the most essential thing to read if you are even tangentially interested in anything about this list i think. Revelatory to me as a pulpy-literalistic fantasist.

Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson. Inspired by the Calvino book, an enormous overview of planned or dreamed cities that were never built.

Kalpa Imperial by Angélica Gorodischer. Some of my favorite secondary-world fiction I have ever read. Short stories from the history of an empire at the ludicrous extreme of size, depth, history. The English edition was translated by Ursula K. Le Guin who is my favorite.

A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar. Beautiful book and deals with an invented setting and urban spaces with a more densely intellectual approach than I have ever seen.

Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas. An architectural history and “retroactive manifesto” for Manhattan, but some of the most interesting bits are about Coney Island in particular. Huge futuristic conflicts underlie every modern city.

The City & the City by China Miéville. This isn’t a lot of people’s favorites of his because its fantastic elements aren’t the loudest, but it’s so smart and bewildering and develops an allegory for emergent social strata in urban spaces that is really compelling.

The Event Factory by Renee Gladman. Just finished this; it feels loose and dreamlike and engages very clearly with real feelings of exploring new spaces, radically repurposing urban environments...

Country of Ghosts by Margaret Killjoy. Not as totally concerned with cities as the rest of the list, but a really exciting and unusual example of worldbuilding from an intentionally political/utopian perspective.

Surregional Explorations by Max Cafard. The first few essays in this book deal with Surrealist and Situationist approaches to urban space and the unconscious of cities; it’s a weird jumbled book but I liked it