Embarassing and Inaccurate Praise for Jeff's Prior Ambergris Fiction

"Somewhere at the intersection of pulp and Surrealism, drawing on the very best of both traditions, is Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris. Unsettling, erudite, dark, shot through with unexpected humour, the stories engross and challenge endlessly. Ambergris is one of my favourite haunts in fiction."
- China Mieville

"Walking into Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris is like stepping inside of a surrealist painting by Leonora Carrington or Remedios Varo - an unsettling, haunting, fascinating experience. I recommend the journey to all travelers with a taste for the fantastic."
- Terri Windling, Editor, The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror

"A remarkable writer of highly original, utterly hilarious fiction, who continually pushes the boundaries of current literary fashion. The Early History and Dradin, In Love are literary tours de force, in which form and language stubbornly refuse relegation to instrumentality and reassert their irrepressible life. Few works I've read in recent years have given me such pure pleasure."
- R.M. Berry, author of Leonardo's Horse, a New York Times notable book

"[The Early History of Ambergris] is the sort of thing that reminds us that while publishing modes, genres, literary schools and styles, and even the material matrices in which literature is encoded, come and go, there is a restorative impulse, a literary innocence, that transcends the maya thereof, that has not died yet, that remains eternal. Eternal because it generates literature that is written entirely for fun, without the slightest nod to the shrewdities of careerism...It restoreth the soul. It giveth hope."
- Norman Spinrad, Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine

"As the shady demiurge whom we are meant to believe actually 'created' the historical personage known as Duncan Shriek, as well as the whole bloody history and complex culture of a complete world, the character of VanderMeer beggars the imagination. How could one fellow, even half divine, manage to combine the literary qualities of Nabokov, Borges, Barthelme, Cabell, Clark Ashton Smith, Suetonius, and Bernal Diaz into one person? It's impossible to credit!"
- Paul Di Filippo

"If Franz Kafka had a son, and Jorge Luis Borges raised him with Jessica Amanda Salmonson, I imagine the result would look a lot like Jeff VanderMeer - someone who writes with dark dream-time logic, Escher-like precision, and pure imaginative fire."
- Lance Olsen

"I enjoyed The Early History of Ambergris tremendously and I think it's a marvellous piece of work, artfully combining humour and horror to excellent effect. Its mosaic format works beautifully to emphasize and extend the uncertainties of the fragmentary narrative. The greatest challenge facing any modern author is to produce a tale quite unlike any that has ever been produced before, but Jeff has met that challenge head on and answered it triumphantly. I hope the book is a great success, as it deserves to be - and whatever its immediate fate, I'm sure there will come a time when it will be an important and much-sought-after collector's item."
- Brian Stableford

"A text of lethally hypnotic fascination...a masterpiece of ironic perversity [set in] a brilliantly-realized city."
- New York Review of SF

"He will make a major contribution to the field of neo-Decadent dark fantasy."
- St. James Guide to Horror, Gothic, and Ghost Writers

"Vivid and beguiling, excellent exercise for the imagination, and efficient means of transportation to other realities. [VanderMeer] liberates us from the miserable reality of our days."
- Rain Taxi

"The author's prose is delicate and ornate, but the narrative has force and wit in plenty...dramatizes and celebrates the anxiety and exhileration of entering the unknown - quite excellent."
- Interzone

"...impressive work...I confess I tried to skim its pages - my usual procedure - but soon found that it was unskimmable and that every sentence needed to be read (and often reread)."
- Thomas Ligotti

"A really fine example of fantasy taken down the road a piece...well-drawn, tightly-focused...fantasy in fine fettle, healthy and vital, an intelligent, exciting exploration of the darker realms of the heart, with the good strong currents of myth and archetype to bear it along."
- Tangent

"Set in the kind of no-time neverwhere city that Jorge Borges, Jack Vance, and Mervyn Peake might these days hiply program into their satellite locator systems...Lyrical, evocative, grim."
- Ed Bryant, Locus

"Assimilating and transcending such honorable influences as Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Vance, and E.R. Eddison, VanderMeer strides shoulder to shoulder with such currently working authors such as Paul Park, M. John Harrison, and Thomas Ligotti."
- Asimov's SF Magazine

More Exchange Information:
The Exchange by Nicholas Sporlander
A Decadent & Obfuscatory Interview with the Artist, Eric Schaller
A Lurid Explanation of the Ultra-Decadent Hoegbotton & Sons Imprint

Please contact Eric Schaller at egs@cisunix.unh.edu for questions regarding art or production of The Exchange. Jeff VanderMeer can be contacted at vanderworld@hotmail.com.

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