Helen Constantine

Choderlos de Laclos

Published in 1782, just years before the French Revolution, Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a disturbing and ultimately damning portrayal of a decadent society. At its centre are two aristocrats, former lovers, who embark on a sophisticated game of seduction and manipulation to bring amusement to their jaded existences. While the Marquise de Merteuil challenges the Vicomte de Valmont to seduce an innocent convent girl, the Vicomte is also occupied with the conquest of a virtuous married woman. But as their intrigues become more duplicitous and they find their human pawns responding in ways they could not have predicted, the consequences prove to be more serious, and deadly, than Merteuil and Valmont could have guessed.

Dangerous Liaisons

Theophile Gautier

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.

Mademoiselle de Maupin

Émile Zola

Patrick McGuinness

An ambitious and unscrupulous priest arrives in the provincial town of Plassans, intent on conquering its political and social life. His arrival has profound consequences for the Mouret family, whose lives are turned upside down. This is the fourth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, and the first modern translation for more than fifty years.

The Conquest of Plassans

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this attractive collection of translated stories evokes the many transformations the city has undergone. Including both well-known and new writers, the book will appeal to people who love travelling or are armchair travellers, as much as to those who love Berlin.

Stories

Berlin Tales

Paris Tales is a highly evocative collection of stories by French and Francophone writers who have been inspired by specific locations in this most visited of capital cities. The twenty-two stories - by well-known writers including Nerval, Maupassant, Colette and Echenoz - provide a captivating glimpse into Parisian life from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Six of the stories included in this collection have never been translated into English before. Unique in exploring the city through literature set in different quartiers; photographs and maps complement the stories and create a literary tour of Paris.

Paris Tales

Eve Patten

Paul Delaney

Dublin Tales

Paul Vincent presents a compelling collection of prose fiction, memoirs, and anecdotes centering on Amsterdam from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century, which gives unique insight into the history and culture of the city. The tales within range from Rembrandt to the Jewish persecution 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 works give the reader, and the traveller, a tantalising glimpse of the Amsterdam that lies beyond the tourist guidebooks.

Amsterdam Tales

Fifteen tales from Russia's mysterious capital city provide an absorbing and many-sided portrait in fiction for readers who love travelling, armchair travellers, lovers of Russian literature, as well as those who love Moscow.

Moscow Tales

Hugh Shankland

In ways no guide book can achieve, these twenty absorbing tales by Italian authors ranging from Boccaccio in the Middle Ages to contemporary new writers offer the delight of discovering and exploring one of the world's most unique cities thorough a wide variety of individual lives and epochs. Casanova sets about seducing the hotelier's daughter only minutes after his arrival, a notorious Spanish prostitute in Renaissance Rome endures a public hiding withoutflinching, 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. Adeep sense of timelessness, of separate destinies entwined across a gulf of centuries, is the cumulative effect of this vivid mosaic of dramatic or comic or tragic stories set in the Eternal City.

Rome Tales

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.

Copenhagen Tales

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.

David Constantine

Sasha Dugdale

Centres of Cataclysm covers the fifty-year history of Modern Poetry in Translation, one of the UK's most innovative and prestigious poetry magazines. Founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, MPT has published some of the first translations of the twentieth century's most significant poets, among them Zbigniew Herbert, Yehuda Amichai, Marina Tsvetaeva and Miroslav Holub. MPT was intended, in Ted Hughes's words, as an 'airport for incoming translations', so they might find more permanent residence in English-language poetry. This celebratory and inspiring anthology, Centres of Cataclysm, includes excellent and various poems from the MPT archive together with responses to those poems by English-language poets and writers. Included here also are letters concerning the magazine's history as well as short essays on the art of translating poetry.

Celebrating Fifty Years of Modern Poetry in Translation

Centres of Cataclysm

Penguin Classics Introduction to Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos (Penguin Classics)

Diaspora

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.

Lisbon Tales

Features writing that is, in one sense or another, a reflection or lingering effect of poets and artists who have gone before.

After-images

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 Kurnberger, Adalbert Stifter - but also the most recent generation of Viennese writers, Doron Rabinovici, Eva Menasse, Dimitre Dinev, with tales as yet unknown in English.

Vienna Tales

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 the15th-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.

Paris Metro Tales

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.

Helen Constantine

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