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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.
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Parnassus (Paperback)
David Constantine, Helen Constantine; Illustrated by Lucy Wilkinson
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R285
Discovery Miles 2 850
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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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.
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Love Poems (Hardcover)
Bertolt Brecht; Translated by David Constantine, Tom Kuhn; Foreword by Barbara Brecht-Schall
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R608
Discovery Miles 6 080
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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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."
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Belongings (Paperback)
David Constantine
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R340
R276
Discovery Miles 2 760
Save R64 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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Faust, Part I (Paperback, New Ed)
Goethe; Translated by David Constantine; Preface by A.S. Byatt
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R307
R249
Discovery Miles 2 490
Save R58 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 latest volume in Methuen's Collected Brecht includes two plays
previously untranslated into English Volume 8 of Brecht's collected
plays contains his last completed plays, from the eight years
between his return from America to Europe after the war and his
death in 1956. Brecht's ANTIGONE (1948) is a bold adaptation of
Holderlin's classic German translation of Sophocles' play. A
reflection on resistance and dictatorship in the aftermath of
Nazism, it was a radical new experiment in epic theatre. THE DAYS
OF THE COMMUNE (1949) is a semi-documentary account of the Paris
Commune, and Brecht's most serious and ambitious historical play.
TURANDOT is Brecht's version of the classic Chinese story is a
satire on the intelligentsia of the Weimar Republic, Nazi
bureaucracy, and other targets.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
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'.
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Catan
(16)
R1,150
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Discovery Miles 8 870
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