Book excerpt: 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. Winner of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award for a distinguished nonfiction work in progress, In the City is an unclassifiable, thoroughly original consideration of modern urban life. Colette Brooks's remarkable eye traverses an unnamed contemporary city committing "random acts of awareness." Brooks relays vivid glimpses of the anonymous urban dweller's experience, history, and culture to create a portrait that is deeply familiar yet entirely fresh. "Colette Brooks, with In the City, invents a kaleidoscope of prose that shocks and stirs the urban heart and mindset into shifting forms and patternscolor, 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."PEN/Jerard Fund Award citation