I am in Yangon, the largest city of Myanmar, for only three days before Cyclone Nargis sweeps across the country, driving a tidal surge inland from the Bay of Bengal, killing nearly 85,000 people, and displacing as many as 800,000. But before the cyclone strikes, before the streets are flooded and the electricity goes out and the phone lines are knocked down by huge trees pulled from the ground, I travel the countryside to get a glimpse of everyday life in this Southeast Asian country, which, with no official warning of the storm from the government, is quiet and calm.

I cross the Yangon River on a ferryboat and accept a guided tour from a gregarious and enterprising bicycle rickshaw driver named Kyi. Rectangular ponds for fish farming dot the right side of a narrow road. The ponds are surrounded by tall, leafy trees: acacias, tamarinds, and palms. Farther back sit wood huts with corrugated tin roofs. Hopping off the rickshaw, I follow Kyi down a brick path that's disappearing into the dry soil, beneath some nutmegs, to an open market.

"Can I take a picture?" I say, standing before a squatting, fly-covered man with a black eye and a butcher's knife. He's separating organs from a bluish white pile of cow innards. Kyi nods happily, but before I can raise my camera, a man wearing a blue jumpsuit steps out from behind a fish stall and clucks his tongue. Kyi tells me to put the camera away. Later, as we walk back to the road, I ask him who the man was. "Government informant," Kyi says blandly.

Any examination of the writing life in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, must begin with a discussion of censorship and repression. In the Orwellian police state that is Myanmar—the country has been under military rule since 1962, when General Ne Win staged a coup that dismantled a civilian government—everybody is scared of the authorities, but to be a writer is to actively invite attention. The state censors must approve all printed matter. In order to encourage self-censorship, the authorities review written works after printing but before distribution. Anything they don't like must be removed, and if a censor doesn't like an entire book or issue of a magazine or newspaper, the whole print run is destroyed. Writers who attempt to subvert the system and hide messages in their work risk arrest. In January, when the poet Saw Wai hid a political message that criticized the current military dictator, Senior General Than Shwe, in a love poem, he was arrested and sent to Insein (pronounced "insane") Prison.

Foreign writers and journalists aren't permitted in the country. The American Center in Yangon (formerly Rangoon), a walled and guarded library and English language center affiliated with the American embassy (and heavily monitored by the Burmese secret police), invited Paul Theroux to come and read during the week I was in the country. According to my contacts at the American Center, Theroux accepted, but the government denied him a visa. Similarly, the author Roy Kesey had planned to join me and write an article of his own, but he admitted to being a writer when an embassy official called and grilled him about his visa application, and he was rejected. The writer Imma Vitelli, a foreign correspondent for the Italian Vanity Fair, applied to enter the country two weeks after I left but, like most journalists trying to enter the country to cover the aftermath of the cyclone, she was denied.

For my part, I wrote "teacher" in the box on the application that asked me to identify my profession, and I was granted a tourist visa. I spent the trip contacting writers on phones I presumed to be bugged, interviewing authors I presumed to be watched, and wondering when the authorities would seize me and put me on the next flight out. Sadly, I felt less conspicuous, and therefore safer, after the cyclone swept Yangon. With so much chaos and destruction, I assumed the security forces were too distracted to track me.

Now that I'm out of the country, I'm faced with a dilemma. How do I write about the things I learned without risking the lives of the Burmese authors who spoke with me? Previous Western writers have simply changed the facts to obscure their sources, but such efforts can end up sounding poorly researched and slightly incredible (when they are actually neither). Some of my interview subjects, unwilling to be intimidated, have allowed me to use their names, but I have tried to protect others by changing their names and other pertinent characteristics.

Despite its poverty and dispiriting censorship, Myanmar is a highly literate country. With a per capita income of less than two hundred dollars a year, it's one of the poorest nations on the planet, but 90 percent of its roughly fifty million citizens can read.

In Yangon, bookstores and magazine stands are ubiquitous. Sellers of secondhand books operate in open-air stalls along the sidewalks of Pansodan Street across from the brick clock towers of the colonial-era High Court building, which is surrounded by a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence and guarded by sentries. Plastic sheeting protects their stacks of books from the occasional rainstorm.

At the Sule Pagoda, the gilt and marble temple at the center of the old city, and also at the Shwedagon Pagoda, the massive, luminous, hilltop temple north of the city where Buddhists burn incense and press their foreheads to the marble pavilions beneath carved icons and golden spires, there are arcades with bookstores selling copies of the ancient Pali texts—the canon of Theravada Buddhism—that formed the entirety of the written word here before the arrival of the British in 1824. (By 1886, the country had been established as a province of British India; in 1937 it became a separate, self-governing colony; eleven years later, the nation became an independent republic, but democratic rule ended in 1962.) In addition to the original texts, modern novels based on the religious stories are popular in the bookstores that dot the city's downtown.

The helpful owner of the Bagan Bookshop, located in two neat rooms on Thirty-seventh Street, searches his shelves for me and locates a bootleg copy of the stories of Burmese writer Thein Pe Myint. An American graduate student, Patricia M. Milne, who worked under Anna Allott, the English grande dame of Burmese literary studies, translated the book in 1975. Thein Pe Myint wrote in the 1930s and 1940s while he fought for freedom from the British, and he offers the native alternative to Orwell's imperial perspective. The opening story in the book begins with news of a storm: "The banyan and tamarind trees were swaying, while the smaller trees and bushes were practically prostrate, just like little chickens cringing in fear of a kite." I read these lines as cyclone winds begin to break over the city, causing the corrugated tin roof of the home beneath my hotel window to flap and bang.

Short stories deemed acceptable by Burmese censors generally follow the socialist realist model. They are patriotic or nationalist; they promote selflessness; they say something nice about love or hard work; they end with a moral. I meet with the short story writer and translator U San in a crumbling, colonial-era villa not far from the vast new American embassy, a short drive from the Shwedagon Temple. A taxi drops me by the open gate, and I walk up a short driveway, past an overgrown lawn, onto a rotting porch where I tug on a tarnished brass pull. U San answers the door in a white singlet and a green plaid longyi, the traditional sarong-like garment worn by both men and women in Myanmar. Like all the writers I meet with in Myanmar, U San can speak English. After some brief pleasantries, he tells me he is upset because the censor has just rejected an article he wrote.

"It was supposed to go here," he says, holding up a newspaper and showing me the advertisement that occupies the space on the page where his article was scheduled to appear. "There was nothing political in it. It was an article about the Burmese language. The censor just didn't agree with my perspective."

He leads me into a pleasant sitting room with high ceilings and a towering glass-fronted mahogany cabinet crowded with small icons. The collection includes numerous brass bodhisattvas, a porcelain Chairman Mao smoking a cigar in a wicker chair, and a bust of Shakespeare. An accomplished teacher in his sixties, U San has a slender aristocratic bearing and thinning white hair that he sweeps straight back across a mottled scalp. In between lectures about the evolution of the contemporary short story in Myanmar, he fusses and shuffles about like the unassuming detective Father Brown in the old G. K. Chesterton stories—a clever man projecting a simple facade. He offers me tea, but then forgets to bring it and instead returns with a stack of his translations.

"I haven't written any stories since my student days," he says. "I'm a translator." He shows me his first anthology of translated stories, published in 1969. "It was a best-seller and went through three editions. Before this, Burmese stories were just nursery rhymes and Pali tales, but afterward, they began to experiment."

The anthology is a paperback survey of writers from the Western canon. It starts with Defoe, offers excerpts from Austen, Hawthorne, and Dickens, then samples the American modernists and ends with a story by Updike. Over the course of the 1970s, the collection transformed the Burmese writing scene and drew criticism from Burmese academics, who accused its translator of promoting Western tastes and values at the expense of Burmese traditions, U San says. In the years since, he has published other translations that cover the same basic periods, but he supports himself through his teaching.

He explains that the first Western-style novel to be printed in Myanmar was a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. Around 1900, the Burmese writer James Hla Gyaw published Maung Yin Maung Ma Me Ma, which reset the Dumas novel in Burma and proved to be very popular.

U San lifts one of his own anthologies. "I had to change the name of this one. I named it A Jury of Her Peers after the Susan Glaspell story that is in it. But the government thought the her was Suu Kyi," he says, referring to the leader of the Myanmar opposition party who has been under house arrest for thirteen of the last eighteen years. "I had to change it before the publisher could release it."

I glance out the window, beneath a dusty curtain, and watch an Indian almond tree swaying violently. Earlier in the day I was at the American Cultural Center, where an American acquaintance warned me that a cyclone was going to strike Yangon later that evening. U San says he has heard about the coming storm from a friend. Although U San is hospitable, I'm worried that the rains will begin and I'll be stranded with him. After a bit more polite discussion, I apologize and walk back to the road to find a taxi.

As I'm thanking him, I ask him how much I can quote from our conversation for this article. He offers me a bemused Father Brown smile and says, "I have said nothing political." I nod but am not sure what to think. His complaints about the censors are clearly political. In the end, the threat posed by the junta has forced me to change his name and alter descriptions of his home.

The storm arrives that evening at 11:30. I suffer through a sleepless night listening as the hotel's windows smash and the corrugated panels of the neighboring rooftop slap and eventually fly away. At two in the morning, the ancient tamarind tree growing out of the sidewalk in front of the hotel comes crashing down on the three-story rooftop, causing the whole structure to shudder. By three, the hotel has begun to leak; water seeps down from the ruined roof, dripping through the ceilings of the rooms and flooding the corridors. By daylight, the power is out across the city, and the shortages begin. By the time the trees have been chopped to pieces by teams of patient men with simple hand tools (machetes, axes, and handsaws) and vehicles can begin to get through, the cost of gasoline has tripled.

In isolated corners of the city, I discover that, miraculously, some telephones are working. I borrow the hotel owner's mobile phone (which I learned was a rare and expensive luxury in Myanmar when I walked into a cell phone store and was told that, although phones were being sold as status symbols, no SIM cards were available without government permission and $2,500). Using the borrowed cell phone, I reach several more writers and arrange to meet them. Taxis are no longer an option, so I trek across the city, weaving around, over, and even through downed trees that have fallen onto the electrical and telephone lines, webbing the streets with wires.

I meet with Chit Oo Nyo in his modest flat, one floor up from the numbered streets just north of the imperial-era Strand Hotel. Thankfully, his apartment has escaped major damage, but he's without electricity and has to carry water up from the street. He introduces himself as simply "Mr. Chit." His wife, "Lady Chit," is a bright, plump woman who sits across from us and fans us with a plastic fan while we talk. I'm still sweating from the walk through the humid streets. Mr. Chit leaves a lit flashlight on the table. On a daybed in the shadows at the back of the room sit his silent, bald mother and his similarly silent sister; both of them appear to be meditating.

Mr. Chit has written and published sixty-two books. His novels are often based on the tales from Hindu legends (stories incorporated into Myanmar's Buddhist belief system much as Christians incorporated the Jewish Old Testament into theirs), and they are all set in the ancient past. One of his most famous books is a retelling of the Ramayana, a poem attributed to the Sanskrit poet Valmiki, who lived in 400 BCE. "The conservatives condemn me because I've reversed some elements," he says. Much like John Gardner's Grendel, which retells Beowulf from the perspective of the monster, Mr. Chit's book is told from the perspective of the Ramayana's antagonist, the ten-headed ogre Ravana.

Lady Chit brings me tea while Mr. Chit takes puffs of a long brown cheroot with a silver band and drinks coffee. "I don't have a schedule," he says. "I write for three or four hours a day. Some days I don't write; I can't. I need not only the will but also the inspiration. Sometimes I can't help writing, as if the words are streaming out." He adjusts his square glasses. "I don't use a computer; I write with my own hand on blank paper—I don't want to confine my words even between two lines."

He is currently working on a novel that reflects the client-state relationship that exists between Myanmar and China. Several of the Burmese I have met have complained that Chinese executives are taking over the country, and my acquaintances at the American Center explain that the Chinese government is heavily invested in Myanmar's oil and raw materials. Mr. Chit's novel, set in the ninth century, avoids contemporary politics by focusing on the relationship between the Burmese Pyu dynasty and the Chinese Later Han dynasty.

Mr. Chit's father was a choreographer of Burmese traditional dances; in the novelist's apartment there is a glass cabinet lined with small statuettes of Burmese dancers. Mr. Chit tells me he has written a story in English about the figurines that was published in a local magazine. It's about how the figurines come to life and finish a story after the writer falls asleep. It begins: "Dr. Maheinda, enjoying the moonlight, opened the window of his study (which was also his reading room, his research room and his library). He felt pleased the air-conditioner did not work as the electricity had gone out. Not relying on the generator or the battery, he lit the Waso [a Buddhist celebration held in July] candles. But under the moonlight, the candlelight was brassy and ugly, so he put it out."

Mr. Chit's novels and stories reflect the oldest traditions in Burmese literature, the Pali religious stories. It is a market he has tapped successfully, but when I ask him if writing sixty-two novels makes for a profitable career in Myanmar, Mr. Chit puffs on his cheroot and tells me he would prefer not to answer. He says no more, but I can interpret his silence: To answer would mean criticizing the government, and that is something Mr. Chit is careful not to do.

The second afternoon following the storm, I meet with the poet Pyin Thu in a third-floor studio on Sule Paya Road, where he holds his English-language classes. He has a dark ponytail and wears steel-rimmed glasses, a purple longyi, and a chartreuse collared T-shirt. Despite occasional problems with censorship, he has published poems and articles in a number of prestigious Burmese literary magazines and has translated the writings of Kenneth Goldsmith into Burmese. He has a poem in English forthcoming in the New Mexico-based arts magazine THE. His first collection of poetry was published in Myanmar in 2005.

On the round wooden table where we sit and talk, there is a copy of Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Simon & Schuster, 2000) and Christopher Merrill's Things of a Hidden God (Random House, 2005). Pyin Thu describes his poetry as postmodern, but this isn't something he strives for. "This came to me naturally, according to my experience," he says. "In my life meaning is not fixed. [We] always talk about chaos and uncertainty in life, how the reality you see is not the reality that is happening around you."

Outside, the city has been transformed by the storm: The colonial-era buildings downtown are missing their roofs, the glass lobby of the Asia Plaza Hotel is gutted, and the streets are a labyrinth of wires, branches, trunks, and twisted signs. Meanwhile, from their new, undamaged capital to the north, the government estimates that hundreds have died. In actuality, that number may be closer to a hundred thousand. But Pyin Thu isn't really talking about this kind of difference in perspective. Instead, he says, he's referring to the metaphysical possibilities such absurd discrepancies suggest. "There can be another alternate reality beyond your senses. Whenever I write poetry, I try to show the bridge between Reality A and Reality B."

He lets me look at some selections from his second poetry collection and explains that the censors, who are uncertain whether his preference for aesthetics over literal meaning isn't somehow obscuring a politically charged message, have rejected it. His face grows sober as he tells me this, and he admits that the censorship has led to a debilitating depression that occasionally affects his writing.

Pyin Thu is forty-seven with two children: a daughter about to go off to college and a son already studying to be a doctor. He's of Chinese descent, a minority that currently comprises about 3 percent of the Burmese population. I ask him about his literary influences, and he lists Plath, Hughes, Auden, and the contemporary poet Charles Bernstein. He's also a fan of the Burmese "khit san" writers, a Burmese avant-garde who, in the 1920s, abandoned the traditional florid style favored by the Buddhist writers and experimented with simpler, secular forms.

We talk for more than an hour, and he grows excited as he discusses his philosophies. He's looking forward to an upcoming trip to the American southwest (his exit visa has been approved) when he will meet with writers and read his poetry. "I can't stop writing," he admits. "I always say, ‘No more, nothing else.' But it just keeps on coming out."

It is unusual for a contemporary Burmese author's work to be translated into English, but in September Hyperion released Smile As They Bow by Nu Nu Yi Inwe. The novel, about a Burmese transvestite, a controversial subject in communist and conservative Myanmar, was censored for twelve years before being published in its native language. Its translation was almost immediately short-listed for the ten-thousand-dollar Man Asian Literary Prize. The attention earned the writer an invitation to read at a literary festival in Korea, but it also made her cautious.

When I call and ask to meet with her in the days before the storm, she hesitates. "I'll call you back at your hotel," she says.

"In Myanmar, they can revoke your permission to leave the country at any time and for any reason," another writer tells me. "Even at the airport they can change their minds and say, ‘No, you can't go.'"

In the midst of processing her visa to Korea, Nu Nu Yi Inwe decides it is not a convenient time to meet with a visiting writer from the United States.

The day before I leave Myanmar on my return flight to Beijing, I arrange to meet Dr. Ma Thida. An earlier meeting we arranged was delayed by the cyclone, but on Monday she suggests that we meet in the restaurant of the City Star Hotel, behind the old City Hall near Sule Pagoda and within sight of the storm-ruined High Court building. She sounded uncertain on her telephone, which clicked and faded as we spoke.

Dr. Ma Thida is a medical doctor as well as the author of the novel The Sunflower and the short story collection In the Shade of an Indian Almond Tree, both of which are banned in Myanmar. In the early nineties, she aligned herself with the Burmese opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Her activism resulted in her arrest and secret trial. She spent six years in Insein Prison, much of it in solitary confinement, until international efforts earned her release in 1999. In recent years, she has lectured at the University of Iowa and Yale University, and shortly before my visit to Myanmar, Brown University selected her to receive the International Writers Project Fellowship, a one-year residency designed to help writers who are unable to work freely in their home countries.

On the Monday after the storm, I make the trek through the eastern neighborhoods to the City Star Hotel, which is still without power. I arrive fifteen minutes before our appointed time and take the exterior stairs to the quiet, second-floor restaurant. In the powerless gloom, the fans are still and no food is available. Sunlight, thick with dust motes, angles past curtains on the windows that line the south side of the room. Despite the motionless air and burdensome heat, three men sit at a round table in the center of the room.

I order a warm Coke—the hotel doesn't carry the cheaper Burmese brands like Lemon Sparkling—and take out my copy of Thein Pe Myint's short stories. I find a story written in 1938 that begins: "The monsoon skies were ominously dark over Rangoon. Above the wet green trees and the red buildings, the High Court clock tower stood out tall against the threatening sky. The big clock face, very white against the dark background, showed the time as half past six." A block away, the cyclone has knocked the white face out of the clock tower, leaving a gaping hole. As I turn the pages, I sneak glances at the people seated at the center table. Two are stocky, middle-aged Burmese men, their frames suggestive of ex-athletes. One has a pitted face and wears a Hawaiian shirt. The other has on a black collared T-shirt. Both wear slacks and smoke. The third member of the group is a younger, slender man with Indian features. They do not talk or order drinks. The waiters do not approach their table. I wonder if they are members of the Burmese intelligence assigned to monitor my meeting with the writer. This is the paranoia encouraged by the police state. I've learned to worry; during interviews, I lower my voice to ask certain questions, even when nobody is near.

At 2:30, the exact time the author proposed for our meeting, a member of the hotel staff approaches me with his hand outstretched. "Are you Mr. Steve?" he says. "I am sorry, but Dr. Ma Thida has given me a message. She cannot come. Do you have a message to give to her?" He offers me a piece of paper to write on.