To Walk Alone in the Crowd

Experience the electric pulse of Manhattan through the eyes of a wanderer in this genre-defying masterpiece by the award-winning author of Like a Fading Shadow. Winner of the 2020 Medici Prize for Foreign Novel, To Walk Alone in the Crowd traces the path of a nameless protagonist as he traverses the length of Manhattan, his mind a collage of overheard conversations, subway ads, and snatches from books. Antonio Muñoz Molina emulates literary giants such as De Quincey, Baudelaire, Poe, Joyce, Benjamin, Melville, Lorca, and Whitman, chronicling the urban experience in a work that is part memoir, part novel, and part celebration of the flâneur tradition. Deftly assembling the detritus of the digital age, Muñoz Molina crafts a poem of contemporary life that invites readers to be carried along by the sheer energy of the metropolis. To Walk Alone in the Crowd is both a denunciation of capitalism's noise and a celebration of the beauty and variety of our world, showcasing the power of the aesthetic gaze to recycle waste into art and offer rebirth. Lose yourself in the streets of New York and the pages of a book that redefines the boundaries of genre, blending observation, inspiration, and introspection into a mesmerizing portrait of the city that never sleeps.