To Walk Alone in the Crowd

De Quincey, Baudelaire, Poe, Joyce, Walter Benjamin, Melville, Lorca, Whitman... 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 assembles overheard conversations, subway ads, commercials blazing away on public screens, snatches from books packed into bags, mundane anxieties, and the true flash of insight, into a poem of contemporary life: an invitation to be carried along by the sheer energy of the digital metropolis.