THE CITY, AS HUMAN GEOGRAPHER Rob Shields puts it, is indeed a slippery notion. Not only because cities are made of dreams, imaginations, and representations as much as they are made of concrete streets, buildings, and people, but also because aesthetic responses to the metropolis after postmodernism have become so multifarious that it is becoming difficult to speak of the genre of city fiction. In our age of media technology, mass transportation, and globalization, we are experiencing a proliferation of the urban condition, and yet defining the urban and the culture of cities is getting harder, because the urban has diversified into various urban lifestyles. Metropolises arose with modernism, and modern city texts not only captured the shock and creative potential of the city in their subject matter but reflected the new urban experience in their linguistic and narrative design. Modern city fiction hence did not simply mirror urbanity but arose concomitantly with the urban experience and, for modern writers, “urban space was the modernization process turned flesh.” Postmodern city fiction, in contrast, no longer treated the city as a real realm of experience but as a text. The city was immaterialized and turned into a sign system, which, however, evaded definite readings. With postmodernism the city was fragmented into a myriad of urban images and competing discourses and was transformed from a modernist experiential realm into a “firework of free-floating signifiers.”