City of Rats
Published on 31. March 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
144 pages
978-0-8112-3837-3 (ISBN)
Description
Life isn't easy for a Parisian rat. But Gouri is getting by: with his best friend Rakae, he's got a small business selling worms to pigeons, a cozy bachelor nest at the local florist, an-as spring blooms in the City of Lights-a budding love interest. But after a double date goes horribly wrong, Gouri and Rakae, along with the royal Rat Court-the princesses Iris and Catarina, and their hilariously unpredictable mother, the Queen of Rats-find themselves adrift on the Seine, accessories after the fact to a double homicide, using their new ally, a small human child, as a life raft. From there, the hijinks metastasize. French police collar the gang along with Mimile, a sadistic murderer who never remembers his crimes. But having escaped lock-up (from the cell they'd been tossed into with their arch-enemies, a snake and a terrier), they pay a visit to the God of Man (a homeless recluse hiding out in the Sainte-Chapelle), but then the giant Rat Devil makes his appearance, full of fiery flatulence and threatening cataclysm...
Told in a series of letters purportedly written in rat language and posted from Gouri to his former master, City of Rats is the second novel by French-Argentine exile, novelist, cartoonist, playwright, actor, and queer provocateur Copi to be translated into English and perhaps his most madcap work, an X-rated fable where his high-velocity prose smashes through societal taboos-moral, sexual, or otherwise-like a bullet train hitting a glass house. Whimsical, smutty, and surprisingly profound, City of Rats will leave no reader unscathed, and every reader awestruck.
Told in a series of letters purportedly written in rat language and posted from Gouri to his former master, City of Rats is the second novel by French-Argentine exile, novelist, cartoonist, playwright, actor, and queer provocateur Copi to be translated into English and perhaps his most madcap work, an X-rated fable where his high-velocity prose smashes through societal taboos-moral, sexual, or otherwise-like a bullet train hitting a glass house. Whimsical, smutty, and surprisingly profound, City of Rats will leave no reader unscathed, and every reader awestruck.
Reviews / Votes
"The greatest miniaturist of our age, Copi was a man of the Baroque, a Shakespeare, magically reincarnated in gay Paris." -- Cesar Aira "With his rotating cast of invalids, cripples, and colorful outcasts, Copi unfolds an iconoclast's impudence, and stakes everything on a saturation of buffoonery, on a truly electrifying extremism. Every work by Copi is an earthquake. In Copi, eschatology transforms into a diabolical Venetian Carnival." -- Clarin "Copi's work is intensely political, comic, fast-paced, joyful and dark, but it's nearly impossible to fit it into a tradition or activist project because it disrupts everything: ideology, icons, genders, languages." -- La Nacion "Copi and his works outraged French critics: reviewing Eva Peron, conservative newspaper Le Figaro called him 'sinister, inept, indecent, odious, nauseating and dishonest.'" -- The New Statesman "Copi's tender psychos hurtle through increasingly outre adventures that seem to expand and contract like accordions. Here is radiant detail and joyous destructive energy." -- Robert Glueck "Copi's casual ease with instability is the mark of his true genius: nothing, truly nothing, is safe from his destructive wonder, and what follows the demolition is only more astonishing." -- Federico Perelmuter - Southwest Review "In my life, there is a before and after Copi." -- Gabriela Cabezon Camara "City of Rats is, all at once, a dream-of Gombrowicz, of Macedonio Fernandez-Rataouille, a comic book, and an epistolary novel co-authored by Flaubert and George Sand. Copi was an exile in the absolute sense: exiled from all of society, cast out from language and into the translation of translation. He lays claim to the dregs and dares to scorn both morality and law." -- Ariana Harwicz "Unfurling like a classic film serial, this breakneck voyage one-ups itself in ridiculousness with every new letter, and Copi guides the expedition with a steady hand and his tongue firmly planted in his cheek." -- Publishers WeeklyMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 204 mm
Width: 134 mm
Thickness: 12 mm
Weight
162 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8112-3837-3 (9780811238373)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Born in Buenos Aires in 1939, Raul Damonte Botana derived his sobriquet Copi from a nickname his grandmother gave him, "copito de nieve," or "little snowflake." At six, he went into exile with his family in Uruguay and eventually settled in Paris, where he was a cartoonist, performer, playwright, and novelist until his death from an AIDS-related illness in 1987. Kit Schluter is the author of Cartoons (City Lights, 2024) and has recently translated books from the French and Spanish by Copi, bruno dario, Rafael Bernal, Mario Levrero, Marcel Schwob, Olivia Tapiero, and Enrique Vila-Matas. He lives in Mexico City.
Cesar Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. He won the 2021 Formentor Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker International Prize.
Cesar Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. He won the 2021 Formentor Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker International Prize.