The nation's favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its tenth year. Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover - or, more accurately, by its title. This new series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor's brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume. Featuring: Richard Lawrence Bennett, Luke Brown, David Constantine, Tim Etchells, Nicola Freeman, Amanthi Harris, Andrew Hook, Sonia Hope, Hanif Kureishi, Helen Mort, Jeff Noon, Irenosen Okojie, KJ Orr, Bridget Penney, Diana Powell, David Rose, Sarah Schofield, Adrian Slatcher, NJ Stallard, Robert Stone, Stephen Thompson and Zakia Uddin.

Even in Germany, the scope and force of Bertolt Brecht's poetry did not become apparent until long after his death and today, many of his more than 2,000 poems have never appeared in English. Love Poems, the first volume in a monumental undertaking by David Constantine and Tom Kuhn to translate his poetic legacy into English, positions Brecht not only as one of the most famous playwrights of the twentieth century but also as a fiercely creative twentieth-century poet, one of the best in German literature. With a foreword by his daughter; Love Poems features 78 astonishing and deeply personal love poems that reveal Brecht as lover and love poet whose struggle to keep faith, hope and love alive during desperate times represents the essence of human relationships.

This issue will be largely given over to a collaboration with 'Poetry Parnassus' - the Southbank Centre's celebration of the 2012 London Olympics. Poets from all participating countries will be invited to London and MPT will publish a selection of translations of their poems. Poetry Parnassus marks the first time that so many poets from so many parts of the planet have convereged in one place; it is a monumental poetic happening worthy of the spirit and history of the Olympics. 'My hunch is this will be the biggest poetry event ever - a truly global coming together of poets' (Simon Armitage, the poet behind the idea and Artist in Residence at Southbank Centre) The issue will be enhanced with other translated poems, brief essays, anecdotes and images concerned, in whatever fashion, with the Games (ancient or modern) or with Parnassus, home of the Muses. Parnassus was a sacred site for the whole Greek world; Delphi, below that mountain, was 'the navel of the earth'; for the duration of the Olympics a truce was declared so that athletes could come and go safely. The modern Olympics are world - wide. MPT 3/17 will be just as extensive and various.

Like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, David Constantine's poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. The title of his eleventh collection, Belongings, signals that these are poems concerned both with our possessions and with what possesses us. Among much else in the word belongings, the poems draw on a sense of our 'co-ordinates' - something like the eastings and northings that give a map-reference - how you might triangulate a life. The poems ask: Where do you belong? And have in mind also the hostile: You don't belong here. Go back where you belong. Many, possibly all, the poems in the collection touch more or less closely on such matters. Perhaps all poetry does, showing a life in its good or bad defining circumstances. In the poem 'Red', the defining geography is literal, drawn from an old geological map of Manchester in which Constantine finds 'the locus itself, a railway cutting / Behind the hospital I was born in', from which the paths of a life led outward. In other poems the particular becomes universal, a territory holding all our belongings, our memories of the people and the places we hold in our hearts. Behind these explorations another kind of belonging is challenged: our relationship with the planet to which we belong, but which does not belong to us.

Even in Germany, the true scope and force of Bertolt Brecht s poetry did not become apparent until long after his death in 1956, and even today, so many of his more than 2,000 poems have never appeared in English. Love Poems, the first volume in a monumental undertaking by David Constantine and Tom Kuhn to translate his poetic legacy into English, positions Brecht, the author of Mother Courage and The Threepenny Opera, not merely as one of the most famous playwrights of the twentieth century but also as a fiercely creative twentieth-century poet, one of the best in the whole of German literature. With a personal foreword by his own daughter, Barbara Brecht-Schall, Love Poems features 78 astonishing and deeply personal love poems many addressed to particular women that reveal Brecht as lover and love poet whose bitter struggle to keep faith, hope, and love alive during desperate times represents the essence of human relationships."

Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Story Collections of 2015 Featuring the story adapted into the Academy Award nominated film, 45 YEARS "I started reading these stories quietly, and then became obsessed, read them all fast, and started re-reading them again and again. They are gripping tales, but what is startling is the quality of the writing. Every sentence is both unpredictable and exactly what it should be." A.S. Byatt, The Guardian The first American publication by one of the greatest living fiction masters, In Another Country spans David Constantine's remarkable thirty-year career. Known for their pristine emotional clarity, their spare but intensely evocative dialogue, and their fearless exposures of the heart in moments of defiance, change, resistance, flight, isolation, and redemption, these stories demonstrate again and again Constantine's timeless and enduring appeal. David Constantine is an award-winning short story writer, poet, and translator. His collections of poetry include The Pelt of Wasps, Something for the Ghosts (shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize), Nine Fathom Deep, and Elder. He is the author of one novel, Davies, and has published four collections of short stories in the United Kingdom, including the winner of the 2013 Frank O'Connor Award, Tea at the Midland and Other Stories. He lives in Oxford, where, until 2012, he edited Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen.

This new critical biography of Friedrich Hoelderlin (1770-1843) is the first to appear for more than fifty years. In this time his status as one of the greatest European poets has become increasingly apparent - yet he is commonly considered a 'difficult' poet. A prime aim of this book is to make Hoelderlin more accessible to the English-speaking reader. This comprehensive discussion of Hoelderlin's work includes close readings of many individual poems, with English translations of all quotations. The author, who is also concerned to locate Hoelderlin constantly in his times, recounts in a chronological framework the main line of the poet's life, his dealings with his important contemporaries, his love for Susette Gontard, and the long years of loneliness and frustration. Hoelderlin is an archetypal figure, exciting fear and pity, a poet whose religion was founded on the conviction that his gods were absent, and whose modernity lies in his experience of absence.

A reprint of the J M Dent edition of 1997. Heinrich von Kleist was born and grew up in the Enlightenment and died in a suicide pact in 1811, aged only thirty-four. He left behind him literary works which are among the most disturbing and amusing of any produced in that revolutionary and romantic period.

A major new translation of one of the greatest dramatic-poetic works in all of German literature
A magnificent drama shaped by themes of redemption and salvation, "Faust" is the magnum opus of Goethe, "the last true polymath to walk the earth" (George Eliot). As his journey continues, Faust follows Mephistopheles through ancient Greek mythology. Deeply smitten by the incomparably beautiful Helen of Troy, Faust marries Helen, embodying for Goethe his "imaginative longing to join poetically the Romantic medievalism of the Germanic West to the classical genius of the Greeks." "Faust, Part II" even includes eerie premonitions of such modern phenomena as inflation and the creation of life by scientific synthesis.

The stories of David Constantine are unlike any others. His characters possess you instantly, making you see the world as they do - sometimes as exiles, driven into isolation by convictions that even they don't fully understand; sometimes as carriers of an unspoken but unbearable weight. The things they pursue, or evade, are often unseen and at a distance - like the perfectly preserved body of a woman in the title story, waiting to be discovered in the receding ice of a Swiss glacier. These tokens of the past, or future, haunt Constantine's characters, but the landscapes that produce them also offer salvation, places of refuge or small treasures to take solace in - like the piece of driftwood a beachcomber chooses to carve into his idea of perfection. Gathering together stories from over two decades of writing, this selection demonstrates why Constantine has been hailed as 'perhaps the finest of contemporary writers in this form'. Their bewitching and urgent language is at one and the same time unsettling and 'strong enough to help'. Featuring the story, 'In Another Country', that inspired the motion picture, 45 Years.

'I have so much and my feeling for her devours everything, I have so much and without her everything is nothing.' The Sorrows of Young Werther propelled Goethe to instant fame when it first appeared in 1774. Goethe drew on his own unhappy experiences to tell the story of Werther, a young man tormented by his love for Lotte, a tender-hearted girl who is promised to someone else. Overwhelmed by his feelings, Werther begins to see only one way to escape from his anguish. Goethe's story of a sensitive young artist alienated from society channelled the Romantic sensibility of the day and led to a wave of imitations. Werther's searching introspection and the passionate intensity with which he bares his soul have an immediacy that is all the more powerful for being expressed in letters; charting the course of his emotions, they give added drama to the unfolding account. David Constantine's new translation captures the novel's lyric clarity, and his introduction and notes illuminate Goethe's achievement. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading.
In this fascinating addition to the Literary Agenda series, David Constantine argues that poetry matters. It matters for individuals and for the society they are members of. He asserts that poetry is not for the few but for the many, and belongs and can only thrive among them, speaks of and to their concerns. The Poet considers both the writing and the reading of poetry, which the Constantine views as kindred activities. He examines what goes into the writing of a poem and considers what good there is in reading it. Constantine also considers translation, arguing that great benefit comes to the native language from dealings with the foreign; also, that all reading is a form of translation - of texts into the lives we lead. Altogether, The Poet is an attempt, with many quotations, to show how poetry works, what its responsibilities are, and how it may help us in our real circumstances now.

The characters in David Constantine's fifth collection are all in pursuit of sanctuary; the violence and mendacity of the outside world presses in from all sides - be it the ritualised brutality suffered by children at a Catholic orphanage, or the harrowing videos shared among refugees of an atrocity 'back home'. In each case, the characters withdraw into themselves, sometimes abandoning language altogether, until something breaks and they can retreat no further. In Constantine's luminous prose, these stories capture such moments in all their clarity; moments when an entire life seems to hang in the balance, the past's betrayals exposed, its ghosts dragged out into the daylight; moments in which the possibility of defiance and redemption is everything.

In Elective Affinities Goethe conducts an experiment with the lives of people who are living badly. Charlotte and Eduard, aristocracts with little to occupy them, invite Ottilie and the Captain into their lives; against morality, good sense, and conscious volition all four are drawn into relationships as inexorably as if they were substances in a chemical equation. The novel asks whether we have free will or not; more disturbingly, it confronts its characters with the monstrous consequences of their repression of any real life in themselves. Goethe wrote Elective Affinities when he was sixty and long established as Germany's literary giant. He remained an uneasy and scandalous figure, none the less, and readers of Elective Affinities were profoundly disturbed by its penetrating study of marriage and passion. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Goethe viewed the writing of poetry as essentially autobiographical, and the works selected in this volume represent more than sixty years in the life of the poet. In early poems such as ?Prometheus, ? he rails against religion in an almost ecstatic fervor, while ?To the Moon? is an enigmatic meditation on the end of a love affair. The "Roman Elegies" show Goethe's use of Classical meters in an homage to ancient Rome and its poets, and ?The Diary, ? suppressed for more than a century, is a narrative poem whose eroticism is combined with its morality. In selections from "Faust," arguably his greatest and most personal work, Goethe creates an exhilarating depiction of humankind's eternal search for truth.
?Faithful and felicitous, these verse translations . . . are an excellent introduction to [Goethe?s] genius.?
?"The Daily Telegraph" (London)

A reprint of the J M Dent edition of 1997. Heinrich von Kleist was born and grew up in the Enlightenment and died in a suicide pact in 1811, aged only thirty-four. He left behind him literary works which are among the most disturbing and amusing of any produced in that revolutionary and romantic period. He is a modern writer: in the characters and situations he created we recognise our own aspirations and anxieties. Selected Writings includes a translation, with notes, of Kleist's best known plays, stories, and essays.

The eight stories in this volume offer a varied and representative collection of twentieth century German authors from a range of political and cultural backgrounds. Styles include the non-fictional manner of Kluge's montage technique and the contrasting classical storytelling of Penzoldt. With reading notes and parallel texts in German and English, this anthology is valuable to the German student of English as well as the English student of German. Reflecting trends in German literature, the stories have been selected for their quality as well as their readability, and will enhance the appreciation of both languages.

Described as one of the as one of the UK's finest short story writers, Constantine intricately interweaves fictional characters and events with the real to create new ways of seeing and connecting our past, present and possible futures. With extraordinary patience and precision, these stories centre on moments, conversations, meetings that feel like small details picked out from a larger tapestry. From the academic in Paris, researching and processing the atrocities of the 1871 Paris Commune, to the young biographer who tries to befriend the ailing poet Hoelderlin, the characters in this collection are united by an urge for connection, a desire to better know themselves - and the world around them - to counteract a loss of hope and belonging.

SOMETHING HAS FALLEN AWAY. We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject. Following the success of Comma's award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject - Julia Kristeva's theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Georges Bataille's societal equivalent - with visceral stories of modern unease. As we become ever-more isolated by social media bubbles, or the demands for social distancing, our moral gag-reflex is increasingly sensitised, and our ability to tolerate difference, or 'the other', atrophies. Like all good horror writing, these stories remind us that exposure to what unsettles us, even in small doses, is always better than pretending it doesn't exist. After all, we can never be wholly free of that which belongs to us.

Filled with characters that are often delicately caught in moments of defiance, disregarding their age, their family, or the prevailing political winds, this collection finds a space for resistance and taking an honest delight in it. Alphonse, having broken out of an old people's home, changed his name, and fled the country, pedals down the length of the Rhone despite knowing he has barely six months to live. Meanwhile, a clergyman chooses to spend Christmas Eve--and the last few hours in his job--in a frozen, derelict school, dancing a wild jig with a vagrant called Goat. Holding real life at arm's length, this volume's bewitching, finely-wrought stories allow readers to escape and to take possession of the moment.

Gladiators and goddesses, philosophers and poets, epic battles and romantic landscapes - the classical world has for centuries captivated and inspired the west. But what provoked the shift from the western world's love-affair with classical Rome and its manifestation in the Renaissance, to the Hellenic world? The decisive switch in focus and taste from Rome to Greece began in the 17th century, when a succession of travellers - mainly from France and England - journeyed to Greece and what is now Turkey and rediscovered the Hellenic world. In the Footsteps of the Gods traces the ways in which the constantly changing ideal image of ancient Greece, its art, politics and culture, inspired those who travelled there. With lively accounts of their adventurous journeys and vivid descriptions of what they saw, discovered, collected and published about the remains of ancient Greece, it reveals the extraordinary effects that these travellers' accounts had on the poets and scholars of the west, who in turn were influential in creating the idea and ideal of Greece, which became such a powerful force in the arts and politics of the 18th and early 19th centuries. At the heart of the book is, in the words of the classicist, Richard Stoneman, 'a poet's vision of Greece'.