Colette Brooks

In the City

An award-winning kaleidoscope of a book that "shocks and stirs the urban heart," capturing city life on the edge of the twenty-first century.

What kind of person is a city person?

This is a question of increasing importance, Colette Brooks suggests, as the city begins to spread, inexorably, into the furthest reaches of the modern mind. One possibility: a city person is someone "who doesn't feel the need to finish a jigsaw puzzle, who relishes jagged edges and orphaned curves, stray bits of data, stories parsed from sentences half overheard on the streets."

Someone who is willing, sometimes eager, to immerse herself in mystery.

Winner of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award, In the City is an idiosyncratic, lyrical, edgy exploration of the urban experience. This daring, unpredictable work breathes new life into the nonfiction form. Chronicling the often haphazard lives of city dwellers and cities themselves, In the City is a window into the urban psyche.

An unnamed narrator roams the streets of an unnamed city, practicing "random acts of awareness" as she gathers disjointed pieces of the puzzle. She is sometimes in a city that seems to be New York, and sometimes in cities halfway around the world. In her wanderings she collects bits of stories, some taken from the headlines, some from the streets, some from the distant past.

She studies criminals, innocent bystanders, commuters; a renowned painter who fled to the country; a bomber who sends unsuspecting city dwellers lethal packages marked "personal"; a blind, deaf woman who loves to ride the subway; a young cabdriver who keeps an open dictionary at his side as he drives, struggling to learn a strange language; a perplexed explorer who finds himself, against all expectation, stranded at the very edge of the earth.

All of these people, she discovers, are city people, whether they know it yet or not.

Some will flourish, others will be lost, victims of chance and mischance: the woman who drinks by herself in a brownstone apartment; the ancient city dwellers who couldn't outrun fire or flood; the children whose faces end up on posters on a wall. Those who survive learn, sooner or later, that everyone keeps company with ghosts who walk alongside.

In the City shows us that the city is a place where past and present are commingled, where questions rarely have answers, where danger, difficulty, and exhilaration are interwoven in ways we can hardly begin to explain.

Welcome to the city, the place where all contrary indications hold true.

"This is an engaging book, so fraught with self-consciousness as to bring into question our notions of writing and literary structure."—Billy Collins, author of Sailing Alone Around the Room

"I've read In the City three times and expect to read it again. In lovely, exact prose Colette Brooks has fixed her experience of urban life with insight and compassion and humor and a sense of the encompassing mystery."—Stanley Kauffmann

"The modern city, never more so than now, needs its intimate observers and quirky chroniclers. It needs passionate walkers and devoted eavesdroppers, collectors of disparate facts, images, and impressions. Colette Brooks's portrait is fragmented, edgy, tough-minded, unabashedly affectionate-a vivid reminder of a love affair that began with Whitman and Crane."—John Loughery, author of John Sloan: Painter and Rebel

"Colette Brooks, with In the City, invents a kaleidoscope of prose that shocks and stirs the urban heart and mindset into shifting forms and patterns-color, sadness, shock of recognition, slice of history; lostness, foundness. She wields her sensibility like the conductor of a wayward subway train, following its uncharted route from Wonderland to Oz. . . . In the city, Brooks reflects, 'once the unlikely has occurred, it seems inevitable.' So do the eye and memorable voice of Colette Brooks."—Lois Gould, author of Mommy Dressing: A Love Story, After a Fashion (PEN/Jerard Fund Award citation)

"What a bright, enchanting, radiant new voice! Through Colette Brooks's eyes—and her gorgeously crafted prose—I see my beloved city anew, and discover it all over again."—Jay Neugeboren, author of Transforming Madness

"A subtle, vivid portrait of an endlessly absorbing city."—Kirkus Reviews

"Brooks' carefully etched and wistful prose echoes that of such master necromancers of the city as Borges, Calvino, or Auster."—Booklist

"This book is one of a kind: a view right through the stone and steel, an X-ray of the city's consciousness."—Luc Sante