The characters in David Constantine's fifth collection are all in pursuit of sanctuary; the violence and mendacity of the outside world presses in from all sides - be it the ritualised brutality suffered by children at a Catholic orphanage, or the harrowing videos shared among refugees of an atrocity 'back home'. In each case, the characters withdraw into themselves, sometimes abandoning language altogether, until something breaks and they can retreat no further. In Constantine's luminous prose, these stories capture such moments in all their clarity; moments when an entire life seems to hang in the balance, the past's betrayals exposed, its ghosts dragged out into the daylight; moments in which the possibility of defiance and redemption is everything.
Born in Salford, David Comstantine has published several volumes of poetry with Bloodaxe (including Collected Poems (2004), Nine Fathom Deep (2009), Elder (2014) and Belongings (2020)), as well as two novels (most recently The Life-Writer with Comma) and five collections of short fiction: Back at the Spike (1994), the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (Comma, 2005), The Shieling (Comma, 2009), Tea at the Midland (Comma, 2012), which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in 2013, and The Dressing-Up Box (Comma, 2019), as well as In Another County: Selected Stories (Comma 2015). David's story 'Tea at the Midland' won the 2010 National Short Story Award, and his story 'In Another Country' was adapted into 45 Years - an Oscar-nominated film, directed by Andrew Haigh and starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling. With his wife Helen, David edited Modern Poetry in Translation for many years. He is also translator of Hoelderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. He is the winner of the Queen's Medal for Poetry 2020. He lives in Oxford.
Title: The Dressing-Up Box
Author: David Constantine
ISBN: 9781912697304
Binding:
Publisher: Comma Press
Publication Date: 2020-06-25
Number of Pages: 256
Weight: 0.2801 kg
'This fifth book of superb short fiction confirms an extraordinary talent' - The Times; 'It will reward the effort' - The Irish Times; 'Inventive... incredibly moving' - The Daily Mail; 'Subtlety marks every tale in this intelligent, unshowy and often moving collection.' - Ian Sansom, The Guardian
