Alyssa Suzumura sent me a really nice email with photos of some fan art she’d done after reading my mosaic novel City of Saints & Madmen. What I particularly love about this is that it riffs off of the art in the book and makes it different not just in part by re-drawing and original drawing, but by changing the context and the medium. I am not an expert on the process involved, but clearly some kind of plate or etching was made to then print the Burning Leaves cover. The manual addition of color adds another layer of differentiation. I love the combination of suggesting something mass-produced but also carefully hand-made/detailed.

Given that both the text and the art in City of Saints are, in addition to mirroring the real world generally, in dialogue with specific modes of creativity—Decadent-era art and literature, for example; Borges/Nabokovian approaches—it feels right for fan art to continue this process of echoing and riffing in the micro details, while on the macro level making something that, to me at least, seems different from the source material. If the creator gave permission, I could certainly see incorporating this in some iteration of an Ambergris book, wherein it would itself be recontextualized and thus assimilated back into the city.