Featuring:David Constantine, Aminatta Forna, Sarah Hall, Jon McGregor and Helen Oyeyemi.The BBC National Short story Award is one of the world's largest awards for a single short story. All five shortlisted stories, including the winner, are published here side by side. The Award is designed to honour Britain's finest short story writers and to re-establish the importance of the short story as a central literary form.This year's shortlist brings tog...

**WINNER of the 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award****WINNER of the BBC National Short Story Prize**To the woman watching they looked like grace itself, the heart and soul of which is freedom. It pleased her particularly that they were attached by invisible strings to colourful curves of rapidly moving air. How clean and clever that was! You throw up something like a handkerchief, you tether it and by its headlong wish to f...

**WINNER of the BBC National Short Story Prize 2010***SHORTLISTED for the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award*Tree-climbing students, volunteering soldiers, island-bound recluses... The characters in David Constantine’s remarkable new collection are united by an urge to absent themselves, to abscond from the intolerable pressures of normal life and withdraw into strange ideas, political causes, even private languages. Viewed...

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 ...

**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...

Featuring:Steven Blyth, Helen Clare, Polly Clark, David Constantine, Matthew Francis, Sophie Hannah, John Latham, Joanne Limburg, Grevel Lindop, Roddy Lumsden, Ian McMillan, Sinead Morrissey, Sean O'Brien, Ruth Padel, Shenagh Ough, Joe Sheerin, Jean Sprackland, Anne Stevenson, Gerard Woodward and Cliff Yates.Too often the short story is regarded as merely a poor cousin of the novel, a weekend break for novelists - an assumption that demeans the short and ne...

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...

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. Thes...

Manchester has a reputation for being one of the UK’s loudest cities. From its smoggy inception as the first industrial city to its proud traditions of protest and activism, to blazing a trail in the British music scene, the city has always been defined by an inexorable sense of urgency and activity. No wonder, then, that it feels compelled to shout so loudly about its accomplishments.In stark contrast, The Book of Manchester is more concerned with dialling down that sometimes deaf...

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...

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...

SOMETHING HAS FALLEN AWAY.We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject.Following the success of Comma’s award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject – Julia Kristeva’s theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Geo...