The Boreal Amazon, Michel Host

From Paris to Prague, from Cherbourg to the Italian shores and the mountains of China, the six short stories in this collection take the reader to places – streets, squares, and landscapes – that they think they know. But it is the spirit of these places that they will touch, their memory sometimes, the mysteries of their depths, all that a too-quick or distracted glance cannot see. Here, an adventure read on a plane from Sydney finds its unexpected counterpart in Paris; there, a Parisian bookstore closes its doors on curious secrets; elsewhere, a painter vanishes without a trace; a writer falls into a bizarre hell; a sage who has read "all" the books will read one more, the "last" one; a cipher officer finds himself unwittingly entangled in the cruel and seductive legends of Prague's distant past. "Fiction, above all, is an immense country," claimed Antoine Houdar de La Motte. Michel Host explores the borders and crevices of that country.