Books by David Constantine

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.

When I Was Touched By Love is a book of poems divided into six chapters about love, heartache, pain and the beauty of both life and art. It depicts the rise and fall of a man mentally and emotionally heart broken, yet full of sunshine.

The characters in David Constantine's fourth collection are often delicately caught in moments of defiance. Disregarding their age, their family, or the prevailing political winds, they show us a way of marking out a space for resistance and taking an honest delight in it. Witness Alphonse having broken out of an old people s home, changed his name, and fled the country now pedalling down the length of the Rhone, despite knowing he has barely six months to live. Or the clergyman who 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. Key to these characters defiance is the power of fiction, the act of holding real life at arm s length and simply telling a story be it of the future they might claim for themselves, or the imagined lives of others. Like them, Constantine s bewitching, finely-wrought stories give us permission to escape, they allow us to side-step the inexorable traffic of our lives, and beseech us to take possession of the moment.

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. Also featuring selected stories from David Constantine's Comma Press back catalogue : Under The Dam (2005); The Shieling (2009); Tea at the Midland (2012).

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 woman's body re-appears in the glacier, perfectly preserved, where she fell 50 years before. Entering Constantine's 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 protagonist's 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. Features 'In Another Country' - recently been adapted for the big screen '45 Years' starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay.

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.