A fiction of the city as a chorus of voices, an entity that is both one and many
Marream Krollos’s Big City is astructurally innovative work of prose composed of vignettes, verse, dialogues, monologues, and short stories. Alone, they are fragments, but together they offer a glimpse of the human condition and form a harmonized narrative of desire, loneliness, and beauty. Through language that builds, destroys, and violates, Krollos maps the geography of our contemporary condition, a haunting meditation on human togetherness and isolation.
Krollos plays with the tension between the voice of the lonely “I” produced by the urban experience and the polyphony of the city itself. A city is a chorus and a collection of traces; it is a way of being with others and the concretization of the social divisions that keep people apart. As a lifelong city dweller, Krollos is obsessed with the way that cities shape our experiences of the world, our ideas about inside and outside and self and other.
By mapping the emotional highs and lows of particular (though often anonymous) beings, the book creates a geography of the urban consciousness. The sensation of reading this lyric work of fiction is akin to how one experiences an attentive walk in an unknown city: one becomes attuned to the tenor of its many voices, how the languages lift and flourish, and how the micro and macro became integrally linked.
Marream Krollos’s Big City is astructurally innovative work of prose composed of vignettes, verse, dialogues, monologues, and short stories. Alone, they are fragments, but together they offer a glimpse of the human condition and form a harmonized narrative of desire, loneliness, and beauty. Through language that builds, destroys, and violates, Krollos maps the geography of our contemporary condition, a haunting meditation on human togetherness and isolation.
Krollos plays with the tension between the voice of the lonely “I” produced by the urban experience and the polyphony of the city itself. A city is a chorus and a collection of traces; it is a way of being with others and the concretization of the social divisions that keep people apart. As a lifelong city dweller, Krollos is obsessed with the way that cities shape our experiences of the world, our ideas about inside and outside and self and other.
By mapping the emotional highs and lows of particular (though often anonymous) beings, the book creates a geography of the urban consciousness. The sensation of reading this lyric work of fiction is akin to how one experiences an attentive walk in an unknown city: one becomes attuned to the tenor of its many voices, how the languages lift and flourish, and how the micro and macro became integrally linked.
Big City by Marream Krollos is a stunning novel. By turns tender, strange, and fierce, it is always achingly honest, always surprising, and often, just when it needs to be, very funny. I thought of Italo Calvino, Roberto Bolaño, and Renee Gladman while I was reading it. I thought too of explorers and cartographers and strangers sleeping and waking and walking in sunlight. What beautiful, powerful writing this is.’
—Laird Hunt, author of The Evening Road and Neverhome
‘Marream Krollos’s city is place of aloneness and longing. With an obsessive, unforgettable voice (and a rare intellectual rigor), Krollos explores the bottomless antipathy her city dwellers feel for themselves. Big City is an amazing and ferocious book.’
—Brian Kiteley, author of Still Life with Insects and The River Gods
Lonely, menaced, loveless, longing, people sing the city into existence. They ‘squawk and squirt words’; they 'spit on every inch of this concrete.’ Reading Marream Krollos is ‘to withdraw amongst many,’ to become anonymous and personal, to hear voices that contain ‘all forms of palpable weather.’ Read her. Every building in Big City opens up into a bridge that is a sentence that reaches from one body toward another: a plea, a threat, an offering.’
—Joanna Ruocco, author of Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith
Marream Krollos was born in Alexandria, Egypt. She has since lived in Los Angeles, New York, Seville, Seoul, Christchurch, and Riyadh. She received her PhD from the University of Denver. She previously lived in Jeddah where she taught one of the very few creative writing classes in the kingdom.
