num_pages: 432
description: Winner of the 2020 Medici Prize for Foreign NovelFrom the award-winning author of the Man Booker Prize finalist Like a Fading Shadow Antonio Muoz Molina presents a flneur-novel tracing the path of a nameless wanderer as he walks the length of Manhattan and his mind.De Quincey Baudelaire Poe Joyce Benjamin Melville Lorca Whitman . . . each a walker and a city dweller a collagist and a 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 Muoz Molina emulates these classical inspirations following their peregrinations and telling their stories in a book that is part memoir part novel part chronicle of urban wandering.A master collagist himself Muoz 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.A denunciation of the harsh noise of capitalism of the conversion of everything into either merchandise or garbage (or both) To Walk Alone in the Crowd is also a celebration of the beauty and variety of our world of the ecological and aesthetic gaze that can even now recycle waste into art and provide an opportunity for rebirth.
language: English
title: To Walk Alone in the Crowd: A Novel
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux