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In Another Country

Selected Stories

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Story Collections of 2015

Featuring the story adapted into the Academy Award nominated film, 45 YEARS

"I started reading these stories quietly, and then became obsessed, read them all fast, and started re-reading them again and again. They are gripping tales, but what is startling is the quality of the writing. Every sentence is both unpredictable and exactly what it should be."���A.S. Byatt, The Guardian

"Rich and allusive and unashamedly moving."���The Independent

"Spellbinding."���The Irish Times

"An uneasy blend of the exquisite and the everyday . . . the beatific, the ordinary, the rebarbative even, are almost indistinguishable . . . intelligent and well-turned."���The Times Literary Supplement

"Perhaps the finest of contemporary writers in this form."���The Reader

The first American publication by one of the greatest living fiction masters, In Another Country spans David Constantine's remarkable thirty-year career. Known for their pristine emotional clarity, their spare but intensely evocative dialogue, and their fearless exposures of the heart in moments of defiance, change, resistance, flight, isolation, and redemption, these stories demonstrate again and again Constantine's timeless and enduring appeal.

David Constantine is an award-winning short story writer, poet, and translator. His collections of poetry include The Pelt of Wasps, Something for the Ghosts (shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize), Nine Fathom Deep, and Elder. He is the author of one novel, Davies, and has published four collections of short stories in the United Kingdom, including the winner of the 2013 Frank O'Connor Award, Tea at the Midland and Other Stories. He lives in Oxford, where, until 2012, he edited Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 11, 2015
      Despite such accolades as winning the 2013 Frank O’Connor Award for Tea at the Midland and Other Stories, British short fiction author, poet, and translator Constantine has never been published in the U.S. This book corrects that oversight by bringing a brilliant selection of Constantine’s previously published stories to North American readers. The 17 short stories in this collection include “Tea at the Midland,” in which a troubled couple contemplates the death-defying antics of nearby surfers, and the title story, about an aging married man who receives a letter that catapults him back to Germany from the U.K. and the harrowing death of his first love. A film adaptation is slated for release in 2015 under the name 45 Years. The characters sometimes take themselves too seriously, but they all provoke genuine pathos, and Constantine manages to avoid sentimentality. The diverse characters include ex-monks, shamed canons, prostitutes, squatters, successful businessmen, and university professors, but a common thread of silent suffering and dignity ties them all together. The tragic and the beautiful in each of their experiences is heightened by the author’s impeccable eloquence and poetic imagery.

    • Kirkus

      April 15, 2015
      A selection of short fiction by a British author, poet, and translator, this book aims to correct the problem of Constantine's obscurity in North America. If nothing else, these 17 stories-crafted over the course of 30 years-demonstrate the admirable consistency of Constantine's writing, both in subject matter and quality. Sometimes stuffy, sometimes beautiful, sometimes chatty, Constantine's work is what people mean when they call something "European." In other words, the stories are slow, chilly, cerebral, whispers rather than shouts. But they are not entirely indirect; rather, Constantine chooses his moments to strike. That way, when a man named Mr. Carlton cries at the end of this book, it's an emotional scene that feels earned because of the author's restraint elsewhere. Are these stories sometimes too spare, too reserved? Perhaps. But then, many of Constantine's characters are reserved people, and his world sometimes recalls those of Harold Pinter and Ian McEwan, in which the banal niceties of comfortable living-dinners, funerals for colleagues, business trips-seem to conceal great menace. You know that popular cliche-the tip of the iceberg? Well, it's what goes unspoken in so many of these stories that seems so powerful. And then, there's the ice itself: in "The Loss," ice becomes a metaphor for the frustration of a man who has lost his soul. In the chilling title story, ice is what encases a young girl, killed while exploring a glacier, only to be found decades later, "just the way she was. Twenty, in the dress of that day and age." This ice becomes so powerful that it spreads across the entire collection; even when a man and woman have tea near water (as in "Tea at the Midland"), all the reader can think about is the frozen world ahead. An author who deserves serious consideration.

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  • English

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