In the middle of a speech a businessman realises his soul has just left his body... In an Athens marketplace, a jealous lover finds himself staggering through a vision of hell.... High in the Alps, a young womans body re-appears in the glacier, perfectly preserved, where she fell 50 years before... Entering Constantines stories is like stepping out into a wind of words, a swarm of language. His prose is as fluid as the water that surges and swells through all his landscapes. Yet, against this fluidity, his stories are able to stop time, to freeze-frame each protagonists life just at the moment when the past breaks the surface, or when the present - like the dam of the title - collapses under its own weight.
Arvustused
"A haunting collection filled with delicate clarity." --A. L. Kennedy; "I started reading these stories quietly, and then became obsessed... The description of the estuary is one of the best descriptions of the surface of the Earth I have ever read." --A. S. Byatt
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Born in Salford, David Constantinr 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.
