Venice Tales is the first comprehensive collection of short-stories on Venice by Italian authors. The book encompasses a broad chronological span, beginning from the Middle Ages (Boccaccio), through to the early modern period (Sansovino), the Enlightenment (Casanova, Goldoni), to the modern and contemporary eras (Marinetti, Montale, Calvino, Scarpa and others). A dream-like city uniquely built on water, Venice was a hub of trade with the East and the seminal cosmopolitan city. Ven...

'My little puma! My darling cat! My mountain lion! How will you go on living if we leave each other?' Colette (1873-1954) is one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed French writers of the twentieth century. The Cat (first serialised then published in volume form in 1933) is one of her short novels. This story of a middle-class couple in 1920s Paris follows the familiar romantic structure of the 'eternal triangle', with the unexpected twist that the fem...

'the metamorphosis of Monsieur de Charlus into a new person was so complete that... everything which had appeared incoherent to me until then, was becoming intelligible, and self-evident' The fourth volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time extends the protagonist's journey of discovery into the social world of fin-de-siècle France. As the biblically inflected title, Sodom and Gomorrah, suggests, however, this world has taken on a new colouring. Through a...

Athens Tales is a portrait of Greece's capital through the city's own writers. The book is made up of eighteen short stories, in English translation, by different Greek authors, some of whom have never appeared before in English. Taking a roughly chronological course from the 1890s to the present day, through these stories, the reader follows the history of Athens through its multiple transformations, from a small town in the nineteenth century to a sprawling modern metropolis. Th...

Warsaw Tales is an anthology of short stories and non-fiction set in the Polish capital. Beginning in 1911 with Boleslaw Prus' Apparitions, the collected stories provide a chronological account of the city's tumultuous and dramatic history. Each story captures a phase of Warsaw's past, through the interwar period as a Polish republic, the Second World War and the city's Nazi occupation, the post-war city in ruins and its rebuilding under the communist regime, and its new ...

Saving the Children of the Holocaust tells the astonishing, little-known stories of eight ordinary women who risked everything to save children during one of history's darkest periods.While much has been written about the horrors of the Holocaust, the courage of many who resisted and rescued remains largely unknown. Through extensive research, Helen Constantine shines a light on remarkable women whose bravery gave thousands of children a chance to survive.Find hope and insp...

Dublin is one of the world's great literary cities, immortalized in works by some of the most celebrated international authors. It is a city of warmth and character, which combines the richest of histories with a vibrant contemporary edge, and which welcomes millions of people to its streets each year. In addition to being Ireland's capital city, Dublin is a city with a proud European identity and with long-established, dynamic links with the rest of the world. Dublin Tales compri...

Berlin Tales is a collection of seventeen translated stories associated with Berlin. The book provides a unique insight into the mind of this fascinating city through the eyes of its story-tellers. Nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the stories collected here reflect on the city's fascinating recent history, setting out with the early twentieth-century Berlin of Siegfried Kracauer and Alfred Döblin and culminating in an excellent selection of stories from the b...

Paris Street Tales is the third volume of a trilogy of translated stories set in Paris. The previous two are Paris Tales, in which each story is associated with one of the twenty arrondissements, and Paris Metro Tales, in which the twenty-two stories are related to a trip round the Paris Metro. This new volume contains eighteen newly translated stories related to particular streets in Paris, and one newly written tale of the city. The stories range from ...

Centres of Cataclysm celebrates the fifty-year history of Modern Poetry in Translation, one of the world’s most innovative and exciting poetry magazines. Founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, MPT has constantly introduced courageous and revolutionary poets of the 20th and 21st century to English-speaking readers. Ted Hughes thought of MPT as an ‘airport for incoming translations’ - from the whole world, across frontiers of space and time. These are poems we cannot do without....

Barcelona is one of the most visited cities in Europe, a multilingual capital of an autonomous region that longs to be independent of Spain. The city is famous for its painters, modernist architecture, style of football, and its history, but as Peter Bush reveals it has always been a major centre of literary talent and creativity. Barcelona Tales presents a selection of newly translated short stories by 16 writers, many of them Catalan. The stories explore the themes of migration ...

'She was the golden beast, an unconscious force, the very scent of her could bring the world to ruin.' Nana, daughter of a drunk and a laundress, is the Helen of Troy of Paris. A sexually magnetic high-class prostitute and actress, she becomes a celebrity, rapidly conquering society, ruining all men who fall under her spell-especially Count Muffat, Chamberlain to the Empress. Nana herself meets a terrible fate, consumed by her own dissipation and extravagance, just as the disastro...