ISBN: 0954828011
ISBN-13: 978 0954828011
£7.95 or £6.50 if you buy online now.
208pp
Published: 16 June 2005

David Constantine's Under the Dam was chosen as a 'book of the year' by both The Independent and The Guardian. See Press below.

"FLAWLESS AND UNSETTLING" - Boyd Tonkin, Books of the Year 2005, The Independent.

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 fell 50 years before.

Entering Constantine’s stories is like stepping out into a wind of words, a swarm of language. His prose is as fluid as the water that surges and swells through all his landscapes. Yet, against this fluidity, his stories are able to stop time, to freeze-frame each protagonist’s life just at the moment when the past breaks the surface, or when the present - like the dam of the title - collapses under its own weight.

“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. Reading them is a series of short shocks of (agreeably envious) pleasure...”
– AS Byatt, Book of the Week, The Guardian.

“A superb collection”
– Nicholas Royle, The Independent

“This is a haunting collection filled with delicate clarity. Constantine has a sure grasp of the fear and fragility within his characters.”
– A. L. Kennedy

LISTEN NOW:

Listen to readings from the various live events. Simply left-click on the links below and listen live, or right-click and 'save target' to your computer to listen to later.
David Constantine reads 'The Loss'.
David Constantine reads 'Visiting'.
Also by David Constantine, 'Beginning' from Decapolis: Tales from ten Cities
David Constantine reads 'Beginning'.

MORE PRAISE FOR UNDER THE DAM:

'Constantine is writing for his life. Every sentence and paragraph is shaped, tense with meaning and unobtrusively beautiful, his images of the natural world burning their way into the reader’s mind...
- Maggie Gee, The Sunday Times, 22 Jul 2007, reviewing William Trevor's Cheating at Canasta.

'The description of the estuary is one of the best descriptions of the surface of the Earth I have ever read' - AS Byatt, Book of the Week, The Guardian.

'I reviewed David Constantine's wonderful stories, Under the Dam (Comma Press), for the Guardian, and am still thinking about the quality of the writing." - AS Byatt, Books of the Year, The Guardian.

'A superb collection'- The Independent.

'Absorbing, incantatory poetic rhythms and startlingly lucid images... admirable control and precision. - TLS.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Constantine is an award-winning poet and translator. His volumes of poetry include Madder, Watching for Dolphins, The Pelt of Wasps, Something for the Ghosts and the epic poem Casper Hauser. He is a translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Enzensberger, Michaux and Joccottet. In 2003 he was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize and in the same year won the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation. In 2004 his poem ‘Trilobite in Wenlock Shales’ was shortlisted for Best Individual Poem in the Forward Prize. Under the Dam is his first full collection of short stories

More about David's new collection, The Shieling here.

ORDERING
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