I, CITY

by Joshua Cohen

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788086264271
Publisher:	Twisted Spoon Press
Publication date:	02/25/2015
Series:	Contemporary Writing from Central Europe
Edition description:	Translatio
Pages:	156
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Pavel Brycz was born in 1968. A graduate of Prague’s Theatre Academy, he worked as a copywriter where he produced the Czech slogan for KFC (roughly translated as "damned good chicken"). He is the author of six books. I, City was awarded the Orten Prize and in 2004 Brycz became the youngest recipient of the State Prize for Literature. In English his work has appeared in the anthology Daylight in Nightclub Inferno (Catbird 1997).

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in New Jersey. His short fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, such as Glimmer Train and The New Book of Masks. He won First Prize in The Modern Word’s 2003 Short Story Contest and was short-listed for the Koret Foundation’s prestigious 2005 Young Writer on Jewish Themes Award. Cohen currently works as an editor in New York. His first book was The Quorum (Twisted Spoon 2005).

Editorial Reviews

Brycz pays tribute to his native Bohemian city of Most in this dreamy, disjointed series of vignettes, first published in 1998. The narrator is actually the city itself (located in the northwestern Czech Republic) and documents the follies of its youth, the vagaries of government and church, and the ravages of Soviet occupation. "I am not a hero," the city declares. "But when people on my streets and in my houses are truly human, I feel heroic." Most is portrayed here as a working-class city made up of migratory Germans, Czechs, Gypsies, Jews and poets speaking an "industrial conglomerate." Sometimes the city narrator waxes nostalgic, as when remembering lost sons of the city such as the Moravian singer and violinist Hanicka Haná, who settled in Most after World War II. Variously, the city marvels at the visiting Berolina Circus's polar bear act, witnesses sad partings between lovers and records good deeds (a taxi driver returns a teenage runaway to her parents' home). The voice of Brycz's battered city rings epic and authentic, while the translators' note offers an extensive history of Most. (Nov. 30)

From the Publisher

Brycz pays tribute to his native Bohemian city of Most in this dreamy, disjointed series of vignettes, first published in 1998. The narrator is actually the city itself (located in the northwestern Czech Republic) and documents the follies of its youth, the vagaries of government and church, and the ravages of Soviet occupation. "I am not a hero," the city declares. "But when people on my streets and in my houses are truly human, I feel heroic." Most is portrayed here as a working-class city made up of migratory Germans, Czechs, Gypsies, Jews and poets speaking an "industrial conglomerate." Sometimes the city narrator waxes nostalgic, as when remembering lost sons of the city such as the Moravian singer and violinist Hanicka Han , who settled in Most after World War II. Variously, the city marvels at the visiting Berolina Circus's polar bear act, witnesses sad partings between lovers and records good deeds (a taxi driver returns a teenage runaway to her parents' home). The voice of Brycz's battered city rings epic and authentic, while the translators' note offers an extensive history of Most. (Nov. 30) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly