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 dont 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 Constantines 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.
Arvustused
'The most striking stories tend to share motifs while circling secret and unresolved situations: "The Necessary Strength" with its broken family in an idyllic setting; "Wishing Well" with the incoming tide as an imaginary threat; and "Tea at the Midland", a concise meditation on art's independence from morality.' - Times Literary Supplement
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1 | (12) |
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13 | (18) |
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31 | (14) |
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45 | (14) |
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59 | (8) |
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67 | (20) |
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87 | (24) |
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111 | (10) |
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121 | (6) |
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127 | (14) |
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141 | (6) |
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147 | (12) |
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159 | (12) |
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171 | (44) |
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215 | (8) |
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223 | (28) |
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251 | |
Born in Salford, David Constantine has published several volumes of poetry with Bloodaxe (including Collected Poems (2004), Nine Fathom Deep (2009), Elder (2014) and Belongings (2020)), as well as two novels (most recently The Life-Writer with Comma) and five collections of short fiction: Back at the Spike (1994), the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (Comma, 2005), The Shieling (Comma, 2009), Tea at the Midland (Comma, 2012), which won the Frank OConnor International Short Story Award in 2013, and The Dressing-Up Box (Comma, 2019), as well as In Another County: Selected Stories (Comma 2015). Davids story Tea at the Midland won the 2010 National Short Story Award, and his story In Another Country was adapted into 45 Years an Oscar-nominated film, directed by Andrew Haigh and starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling. With his wife Helen, David edited Modern Poetry in Translation for many years. He is also translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. He is the winner of the Queen's Medal for Poetry 2020. He lives in Oxford.
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