{"product_id":"city-of-rats-new-directions-publishing-corporation-2026","title":"City of Rats","description":"\n\nLife isn't easy for a Parisian rat. But Gouri is getting by: with his best friend Rakä, 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 Rakä, 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.\n\n","brand":"New Directions Publishing Corporation","offers":[{"title":"New","offer_id":48780483002562,"sku":"9780811238373","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0757\/4195\/4242\/files\/22767693482476.jpg?v=1789158205","url":"https:\/\/mgsfus-av.myshopify.com\/products\/city-of-rats-new-directions-publishing-corporation-2026","provider":"Schmendrick's Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}