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 ...

'There is no more carefully chosen yet eclectic anthology series in existence in Britain today' – Susan Haigh, The Short ReviewBest 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, ne...

In A Bird Called Elaeus, poet and translator David Constantine presents a selection of poems from The Greek Anthology, a collection of around 4500 poems composed over more than 1500 years by around 300 authors.The Greek Anthology is a marvellous salvage from the vast shipwreck of the Ancient World, a colossal continuity and variety from pre-classical times through Roman into Byzantine. For A Bird Called Elaeus – his small antholo...

Goethe's Faust reworks the late-medieval myth of Dr Faust, a brilliant scholar so disillusioned he resolves to make a contract or wager with the devil, Mephistopheles. The devil will do all he asks on Earth and seek to grant him a moment in life so glorious that he will wish it to last for ever. But if Faust does bid the moment stay, he falls to Mephisto and must serve him after death. In this first part of Goethe's great work the embittered thinker and Mephistopheles enter into their agre...

Longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in TranslationAn historic publication in which the legendary German poet and dramatist emerges, quite like Goethe, as a poet driven by Eros.Bertolt Brecht is widely considered the greatest German playwright of the twentieth century, and to this day remains best known as a dramatist, the author of Mother Courage, The Threepenny Opera, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, among so ...

A collection of specially commissioned, urban short stories edited by Ra Page to mark the launch of Comma Press.Featuring:Michael Bracewell, Shelagh Delaney, Paul Morley, Gwendoline Riley, Anthony Wilson, Gerard Woodward, Tariq Mehmood, David Constantine, Clare Pollard, Amanda Dalton, Michael Symmons Roberts, Emma Unsworth, Tony Sides, Wayne Clews and Jeanie O'Hare.The city is at once strange and strangely familiar in these stories. Friendships brea...

Larissa Boehning (Berlin), David Constantine (Manchester), Arnon Grunberg (Amsterdam), Emil Hakl (Prague), Amanda Michalopoulou (Athens), Empar Moliner (Barcelona), Aldo Nove (Milan), Jacques Réda (Paris), Dalibor Šimpraga (Zagreb), Ágúst Borgþór Sverrisson (Reykjavik).Decapolis is a book which imagines the city otherwise. Bringing together ten writers from across Europe, it offers snapshots of their native cities, freezing for a moment the characters and complexities that define t...

Described 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 the atrocities of the fall of 1871 Paris Commune, to ...

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. Many of the poems in his latest collection spring from particular localities: Scilly, the North of England, Southern France, the Aegean, Wales; others from certain places (loci) in literature and mythology. Inspired by such 'local habitations' and the people who live there, the poems of Elder express gratitude and loyalty, but also grief at every ha...

Against the backdrop of war, a group of children barricade themselves in an abandoned townhouse, cherishing what’s left of their innocence with the help of a dressing-up box...A deep-sea diver takes to being suspended for hours at a time on the end of a line not long enough to reach the seabed...An aging widower moves into the shed at the end of his garden to plan out his ‘endgame’ surrounded by a lifetime’s worth of hoarded curiosities...The characters in David Con...

**WINNER of the BBC National Short Story Prize 2010**David Constantine's Under the Dam was chosen as one of their Books of 2005 by both The Independent and The Guardian.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 fel...

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 histor...