“There’s something about the arachnid,” Miéville told me recently, on the phone from his home in London. In Miéville’s new novella, “The Last Days of New Paris,” the streets of Paris in 1950 have gone haywire after the detonation of a reality-altering bomb that brings various Surrealist works to frightening life, including an arachnoid manifestation reminiscent of Odilon Redon’s painting “ The Smiling Spider.”** ** In his breakthrough novel, 2000’s “Perdido Street Station,” a mysterious, spiderlike being called the Weaver assists a scientist named Isaac who’s trying to save the fantastical city of Bas-Lag from a catastrophic infestation. Photograph by Andrew Testa / The New York Times / ReduxĬhina Miéville has long had spiders on the brain. In China Miéville’s new novella, “The Last Days of New Paris,” the detonation of a reality-altering bomb brings various Surrealist works to frightening life.
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