Decapolis: Tales from Ten Cities - Couverture souple

Boehning, Larissa; Constantine, David; Grunberg, Arnon; Edelfeldt, Inger; Hakl, Emil; Michalopoulou, Amanda; Moliner, Empar; Nove, Aldo; Reda, Jacques; Simpraga, Dalibor; Sjon

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1905583036 ISBN 13 : 9781905583034

Editeur : Comma Press, 2006

Synopsis

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 them. Ten cities: diverse, incompatible, contradictory in everything from language to landscape. In Amsterdam every Friday night, a lonely woman cooks for her men, a circle of middle-aged bachelors. In Barcelona, a self-regarding poet tries to capture the essence of the city in an eleven-word lyric. In Reykjavik, an unemployed journalist wanders through the deserted buildings of the newspaper he once wrote for. In all cases, these are cities in states of transition: Zagreb in the shadow of the Balkan conflict; Manchester on the cusp of social and economic change; Berlin with half its industrial buildings abandoned like the Mary Celeste. The ultimate untranslatability of these cities experiences is never in question, and yet through these fractured, isolated glimpses chance encounters, snatches of conversation, local TV bulletins something quite unlikely begins to emerge: a commonality grounded in the fleeting and the momentary, a continuum, perhaps, of urban experience *'Deca-Polis': Greek for ten-cities .

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Larissa Boehning was born in Berlin in 1971. Her debut collection, Swallow Summer, published in 2003, received critical acclaim firmly establishing her as one to watch. Critics were amazed by the way her virtuoso literary abilities allowed her to make the small disasters that occur in everyday life appear continually interesting and relevant. Boehning is able to capture the absurdity of the fixed situation avoiding banality. Her fascinating characters are depicted in a marvellously rhythmic prose. David Constantine has published several volumes of poetry, most recently, Nine Fathom Deep (2009). He is an award-winning translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. He is also author of one novel, Davies, and Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton. His three previous short story collections are Back at the Spike, the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (Comma, 2005), and The Shieling (Comma, 2009), which was shortlisted for the 2010 Frank O Connor International Short Story Award. Constantine s story Tea at the Midland won the BBC National Short Story Award 2010. Arnon Grunberg is one of Holland's most prolific and acclaimed writers. He has published eleven novels to date, three collections of essays and two plays. His first novel, Blue Mondays (1994) won the Dutch prize for the best debut novel that year. In 2000, under the pseudonym Marek van der Jagt, he won the best debut prize again for his novel De geschiedenis van mijn kaalheid (The History of My Baldness), and in the same year his novel Phantom Pain was published and went on to win the AKO Prize, the Dutch equivalent of the Booker. The English translation of this novel was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2005. In 2007, The Jewish Messiah was published by Penguin USA. This is the first translation of his short fiction. He lives and works in New York.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Comma Press
• Date d'édition: 2006
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1905583036
• ISBN 13: 9781905583034
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 136
• Éditeur: Crossan Maria
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible