'I have so much and my feeling for her devours everything, I have so much and without her everything is nothing.' The Sorrows of Young Werther propelled Goethe to instant fame when it first appeared in 1774. Goethe drew on his own unhappy experiences to tell the story of Werther, a young man tormented by his love for Lotte, a tender-hearted girl who is promised to someone else. Overwhelmed by his feelings, Werther begins to see only one way to escape from his anguish. Goethe's story of a s...

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...

First selected stories and North American fiction debut by the winner of the 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award (winning over Joyce Carol Oates, Deborah Levy, Peter Stamm, and Tamas Dobozy)Strong bookseller reaction from BEA chapbook: "Unexpectedly teared up at breakfast while reading David Constantine's "In Another Country" from @biblioasis", tweeted Todd Wellman of Boswell Book Co, and "In Another Country" featured on the "What We're Loving" blog of the Paris...

'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...

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 ...

**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...

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...

A New York Times Notable Book 2016An October Indie Next List Great Reads” PickAfter the death of her beloved husband, Katrin, a literary biographer, picks her way through a trove of his letters and postcards, slowly piecing together the entirety of his life. Surprised by an unlikely chapter in his past that was never revealed during their marriage, Katrin sets off on a heartbreaking journey to discover the man she never fully knew.

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...

In Elective Affinities Goethe conducts an experiment with the lives of people who are living badly. Charlotte and Eduard, aristocracts with little to occupy them, invite Ottilie and the Captain into their lives; against morality, good sense, and conscious volition all four are drawn into relationships as inexorably as if they were substances in a chemical equation. The novel asks whether we have free will or not; more disturbingly, it confronts its characters with the monstrous co...