Fiction. Translated from the Czech by Joshua Cohen and Marketa Hofmeisterova. Winner of the Orten Prize and the State Prize for Literature in 2004. I, CITY is a story about the north Bohemian city of Most, an ancient city founded on a primeval wetland that was literally "relocated" to get to the brown coal beneath it. For Pavel Brycz, the youngest ever recipient of the Czech State Prize for Literature, Most is its varied inhabitants, and he as the city tell its own story through these inhabitants, who make their "appearances" in fleeting, ghost-like vignettes. As they emerge from the pollution, or from the swamp of the town's founding, we find not individuals but representatives. Theirs are historical lives that mistrust history, or that live it at least with typical irony. As Brycz makes fictional people say factual things and factual people (Kafka, the pope, Gustav Husak) say fictional things, post-modernity via magical realism makes its almost requisite--though noiseless--appearance in the best easterly European tradition of Danilo Kis or Isaac Babel.

Patricia Waters was born and reared in Nashville, Tennessee. She took her B.A. in history and English at what is now the University of Memphis. After completing several seasons in field archaeology in Europe, she returned to complete her M.A. in English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She was a teacher, journalist, and community activist in Memphis and New Orleans. She returned to Livingston, Tennessee to rear her children, and later moved to Athens. While teaching at Tennessee Wesleyan College, a generous faculty grant, funded by the Pew Foundation, sent her to writers conferences in particular the Sewanee Writers Conference. Long association with the master teachers at Sewanee, particularly Howard Nemerov, Anthony Hecht, and Donald Justice were crucial to her development as a poet. She returned to UTK to complete her doctorate in English in 1998. After completing a post-doc year in the College of Education, she was writer-in-residence at the University of Tennessee libraries in 2003-2004. She lives in Athens, Tennessee.