Helen Constantine - Böcker

Chevalier d'Albert fantasizes about his ideal lover, yet every woman he meets falls short of his exacting standards of female perfection. Embarking on an affair with the lovely Rosette to ease his boredom, he is thrown into tumultuous confusion when she receives a dashing young visitor. Exquisitely handsome, Théodore inspires passions d'Albert never believed he could feel for a man - and Rosette also seems to be in thrall to the charms of her guest. Does this bafflingly alluring person have a secret to hide? Subversive and seductive, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) draws readers into the bedrooms and boudoirs of a French château in a compelling exploration of desire and sexual intrigue.

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 comprises an exciting selection of stories from across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries which are illustrative of this.The stories in Dublin Tales are variously vibrant, evocative, humorous, and diverse, and engage in different ways with Dublin's history, its culture, its cityscape, and its people. It includes stories by writers who are intimately associated with the city (James Joyce and Brendan Behan), as well as by some of the most acclaimed Irish authors of the twentieth century (Elizabeth Bowen, Liam O'Flaherty, William Trevor, John McGahern, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne). Less familiar authors are also included, as are specially commissioned stories from some of the most talented younger writers writing today (Caitriona Lally, Kevin Power, and Melatu Uche Okorie). Dublin Tales also includes bilingual versions of two stories which were originally written in the Irish language by Dara Ó Conaola and Caitlín Nic Íomhair, which have been specially translated into English for this startlingly original new book.

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 status as the capital of an independent Poland in 1989. With each story set in a specific part of the city, the collection becomes a guidebook to Warsaw's temporal, spatial, and psychological geography.This collection features a wide variety of authors including Boleslaw Prus, Maria Kuncewiczowa, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Ludwik Hering, Zofia Petersowa, Marek Hlasko, Kazimierz Orlos, Hanna Krall, Antoni Libera, Zbigniew Mentzel, Olga Tokarczuk, and Krzysztof Varga.

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. The reader also observes the major events of Athens' recent history - from the effects of the 1923 Population Exchange with Turkey, to Nazi Occupation in World War II, to post-war boom, to Economic Crisis - through a literary lens. The stories have been chosen to give a representative sample of different eras of Greek writing, from 19th century realism to postmodern fiction to detective fiction. As well as being a portrait of the city, the volume also serves as an introduction to the last one hundred and fifty years of Greek fiction writing. Each story is accompanied by a black-and-white photograph (contemporary with the story), some published for the first time, giving the reader a sense of the changing visual landscape of the city, as well as a visual counterpoint to the writing. The volume also includes a scholarly introduction, providing the literary and historical context of the stories, as well as notes and suggestions for further reading.

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. Venice was proudly independent politically from the word go and was at the forefront of several arts and industries: glass-making and ship-building, as well as music and the fine arts. A site of Carnivalesque joie de vivre, luxury, and licentiousness on the one hand, Venice also became widely synonymous with darkness, melancholy, and a wish for death. In short, the siren call of Venice has always seduced literati, visitors, and tourists alike. Venice continues to haunt and inspire the imagination of authors and artists the world over and yet few Italians have dared taking on the city in their works of literary fiction. It is possible that Venice's worldly exotic allure proved daunting and evanescent to many. As these Venice Tales vividly demonstrate, those who did not fear to tread into Venice as a literary subject produced inspired, incandescent, ironical, evocative, tragic, and utterly magical vistas on this unique city which, despite eliciting such wealth of literary, artistic, musical, and theatrical feats, remains to this day largely elusive, fluid, and thoroughly impossible to pin down.

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 the nineteenth century to the present day, and include tales by well-known writers such as Colette, Maupassant, Didier Daeninckx, and Simenon, and less familiar names such as Francis Carco, Aurélie Filipetti, and Arnaud Baignot. They present a vivid picture of Paris streets in a variety of literary styles and tones. Simenon's Maigret is called upon to solve a mystery on the Boulevard Beaumarchais; a flâneur learns some French history through second-hand objects retrieved from the Seine; a nineteenth-century affair in the Rue de Miromesnil goes badly wrong; a body is discovered on the steps of the smallest street in Paris. Through these stories we see how the city has changed over the last two centuries and what has survived. All the tales in the book are translated apart from the last, a new story by David Constantine, based on the last days of the poet Gérard de Nerval.

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 14 writers, many of them Catalan. The stories explore the themes of migration and class conflict in a city renowned in world literature from the day rural innocents Don Quixote and Sancho Panza visited its streets at the beginning of the seventeenth-century, and witnessed the wonders of the printing press and the cruelties of slavery. Together, they open up the city in ironic, tragic, and lyrical ways, inviting readers to explore fictional lives and literary styles that reflect the dynamic, conflict-ridden character and history of this great European city.

Lisbon has been an extraordinary city for well over a thousand years, rendering it a place of great historical and contemporary interest. The combination of cultural influences in Lisbon--Arabian, African, and European--and the city's identity as a great seafaring stronghold, has granted it a unique and spirited legacy. Lisbon Tales reflects this legacy in its literary selections. From famous names to new voices, Lisbon Tales describes a city in continuous and vibrant change.

In this volume Paul Vincent presents a compelling collection of prose fiction, memoirs and anecdotes centring on Amsterdam from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. His selection offers a rare insight into the history and culture of the city. The subjects range from Rembrandt to the persecution of the Jews in World War 2, from barricades in a working-class district during the Depression to a writer's unhealthy obsession with a massage parlour. These eighteen newly-translated tales give the reader, and the traveller, a tantalizing glimpse of the Amsterdam that lies beyond the tourist guidebooks.

French Tales is a collection of twenty-two translated stories associated with the twenty-two regions of France. The book, which includes both well-known and little-known writers, for example Prosper Mérimée in the nineteenth century and Anne-Marie Garat in the twenty-first, affords readers a panoramic view of French society and culture, reflecting, as it does, its variety and diversity from Brittany to Corsica. Writers include among others Maupassant, Zola, Annie Saumont, Marcel Aymé, Didier Daeninckx and Stephane Émond. The subject-matter ranges from stories about marriage, the First World War and homelessness to house-buying, childhood and honour-killing. Following the model of Paris Tales, also translated by Helen Constantine, each story is illustrated with a striking photograph and there is a map indicating the position of the French regions. There is an introduction and notes to accompany the stories and a selection of Further Reading. The book will appeal to people who love travelling or are armchair travellers, as much as to those who love France and things French.

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 best of the new voices in the current boom in German fiction. They are chosen for their conscious exploration of the city's image, meaning, and attraction to immigrants and tourists as well as Berliners from both sides of the Wall. These stories also depict Berlin's distinct districts, not just the differences between East and West but also iconic sites such as Alexanderplatz, individual neighbourhoods (Jewish Mitte, Turkish Kreuzberg) and individual streets. There is an introduction and notes to accompany the stories and a selection of Further Reading. Each story is illustrated with a striking photograph and there is a map of Berlin and its transport system (a frequent motif). There is an introduction and notes to accompany the stories and a selection of Further Reading. The book will appeal to people who love travelling or are armchair travellers, as much as to those who love Berlin.

Presenting stories which represent each layer of the city of Moscow, from the centre of power to the outer rings of desolate estates and tumbledown shacks, this fascinating collection offers a lively and varied portrait in fiction of Russia's mysterious capital city. The collection includes works by Russian authors ranging from Anton Chekhov and Yuri Koval to Larisa Miller and Marina Boroditskaia, collating nineteeth- and twentieth-century tales, as well those written by contemporary authors. The stories are intriguingly varied --an account of life in the city's infamous high security prison, a tale of a lady with a supernatural gift for repairing household devices, the story of another pitiful lost dog who nearly joins the Moscow Circus -- and together they shed light on the changing nature of Moscow society across the centuries. The next instalment in a series of successful translated anthologies of stories set in and around a particular European City. Moscow Tales combines two genres, travel writing and literary fiction and provides an insight into the lives of those who live in Moscow or have written about it.

In ways no guide book can achieve, these twenty absorbing tales by Italian authors ranging from Boccaccio in the Middle Ages to Giacomo Casanova in the eighteenth century, to Pier-Paolo Pasolini in the twentieth and contemporary new writers such as Melania Mazzucco and Igiaba Scego, offer the delight of discovering and exploring one of the world's most unique cities thorough a wide variety of individual lives and epochs. The tales span seven hundred years but rather than being ordered chronologically, old and new appear alongside one another, reflecting the dual identity of Rome - thriving, modern metropolis and ancient city centre that is one of the wonders of the world. The tales are wonderfully varied in style, tone, and subject matter. Casanova sets about seducing the hotelier's daughter only minutes after his arrival, a notorious Spanish prostitute in Renaissance Rome endures a public hiding without flinching, a Danish tourist in her sixties finds an unusual lover, Pope John Paul II uncovers a vast conspiracy against him, a medieval revolutionary demagogue suffers almost the same fate as Mussolini. Each story is illustrated with a black-and-white photograph and there is a map of Rome to help readers locate the important sites which feature in the text. A deep sense of timelessness, of separate destinies entwined across a gulf of centuries, is the cumulative effect of this vivid mosaic of dramatic, comic, and tragic stories set in the Eternal City.

Following on from Helen Constantine's hugely successful Paris Tales, the twenty-two short stories included in More Metro Tales take the reader on an fascinating journey around Paris by metro. The journey begins at the Gare du Nord, stops at twenty underground stations along the way, and ends at Lamarck-Caulaincourt. Some of these stories actually take place in the metro itself, but most are to be found when you emerge above ground. They range from the 15th-century account of the miraculous Saint Genevieve, patron saint of Paris, through tales by favourite writers such as Zola, Simenon, and Maupassant, to Martine Delerm's evocation of the last hours of Modigliani's mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne. Gérard de Nerval evokes the thriving, bustling market in Les Halles in the 1850s; Colette recounts her involvement in a traffic accident near the Opéra; Boulanger describes a blackly funny experience in Père Lachaise.Each story is illustrated with a black-and-white photograph and there is a map and suggested itinerary round the metro system. Readers will find familiar and unfamiliar writers here, but all are masterly writers of the short story and each evokes a different aspect of this endlessly intriguing and much-loved city, whether the traveller is on the metro or at home sitting in an armchair.

The buzzing life of bars, warm evenings by the Manzanares river, the subterranean terrors of the Metro, icy winters and hot, empty summers, student days in the sixties, the ruthless underworld of the city's mafia - this captivating anthology reflects the character of Madrid and the lives of the madrilenos, as its inhabitants are called, in all their splendid variety. Some stories are bizarre, some funny, some serious, and as you read you'll travel through the city. The famous streets and monuments of Madrid - Cibeles, Calle de Alcalá, Plaza Mayor, and the Royal Palace - as well as the poor, working-class barrios unfrequented by sightseers will pass before your eyes like a moving picture. Some stories, like the Galdós story and Carmen Martín Gaite's 'A clear conscience' depict a journey across Madrid, while in Javier Marías' sinister tale, 'Fallen from fortune', a couple are unaware that their guide to all the usual tourist highlights is leading them to their death. In 'Through the wall' and 'Personality disorders', the characters barely leave their apartments, and the city lurks outside the windows. A rich assortment of characters - adolescent boys obsessed with sex; maids up from the country; provincial girls who slide into prostitution; a small boy excited at the prospect of going downtown with his grandfather; vain, self-absorbed thirty-somethings with too much money; immigrant families far from home; mafia types; diligent office-workers struggling to bring up a family - come alive in the tales.Few of these stories have previously been translated into English. Some names, such as Benito Pérez Galdós, Javier Marías, Juan José Millás, and Carmen Martín Gaite, will be more familiar than others but all deserve to be better known. There is a map at the back of the book to indicate the places mentioned in the stories and photographs complement and accompany each story. The reader will also find there biographical notes on the authors and suggestions for further reading.

Situated on the cusp of West and East, between the foothills of the Alps and the mighty 'Blue Danube', Vienna has long presented authors with a wealth of material for stories that entertain and intrigue. The city's famous quality of life and rich variety of cultural offerings is apparent here at every turn, but so too is its darker side, whether it be the Viennese obsession with death and decay or the dramatic, tragic events of its twentieth-century history. In stories from the early to mid-nineteenth century in particular, the city stands for wine, women and song, for a laid-back - - perhaps somewhat lax?- - outlook on life that is invariably linked to its location as German culture's southernmost centre. In more recent tales, the theme of the good life and of Vienna's beauty continues, but there are very few authors who do not dwell on elements of darkness or melancholy. Indeed, from the mid-twentieth century onward, death itself seems to have become literature's preferred guide to the city. The collection concentrates on stories set at the city's margins. The tales are arranged geographically rather than chronologically, around and through the city from west to east and back again. We begin and end with Arthur Schnitzler and Joseph Roth, two authors already indelibly associated with Vienna, but represented here by little-known gems, translated for the first time. Other authors include stars of Vienna's nineteenth century feuilleton journalism - Heinrich Laube, Ferdinand Kürnberger, Adalbert Stifter - but also the most recent generation of Viennese writers, Doron Rabinovici, Eva Menasse, Dimitré Dinev, with tales as yet unknown in English.

Exploring the many moods of the Danish capital.From the narrow twisting streets of the old town centre to the shady docklands, this rich anthology captures the essence of Copenhagen and its many faces. Through seventeen tales by some of the very best of Denmark's writers past and present, we travel the length and breadth of the Danish capital examining famous sights from unique perspectives. A guide book usefully informs a new visitor to Copenhagen but these stories allow the reader to experience the city and its history from the inside.