To Walk Alone in the Crowd

From the award-winning author of the Man Booker Prize finalist Like a Fading Shadow, Antonio Muñoz Molina presents a flâneur-novel tracing the path of a nameless wanderer as he walks the length of Manhattan, and his mind. De Quincey, Baudelaire, Poe, Joyce, Walter Benjamin, Melville, Lorca, Whitman . . . each a walker and city-dweller, each a collagist and chronicler, picking the detritus of their eras off the filthy streets and assembling it into something new, shocking, and beautiful. In To Walk Alone in the Crowd, Antonio Muñoz Molina emulates these classical inspirations, following their peregrinations as well as telling their stories, in a book that is part memoir, part novel, part chronicle of urban wandering. A master collagist himself, Molina here assembles overheard conversations, subway ads, commercials blazing away on public screens, snatches from books hurriedly packed into bags or shoved under one's arm, mundane anxieties, and the occasional true flash of insight--struggling to announce itself amid this barrage of data--into a poem of contemporary life: an invitation to let oneself be carried along by the sheer energy of the digital metropolis.