Description

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Presenting stories which represent each layer of the city of Moscow, from the centre of power to the outer rings of desolate estates and tumbledown shacks, this fascinating collection offers a lively and varied portrait in fiction of Russia's mysterious capital city. The collection includes works by Russian authors ranging from Anton Chekhov and Yuri Koval to Larisa Miller and Marina Boroditskaia, collating nineteeth- and twentieth-century tales, as well those written by contemporary authors. The stories are intriguingly varied --an account of life in the city's infamous high security prison, a tale of a lady with a supernatural gift for repairing household devices, the story of another pitiful lost dog who nearly joins the Moscow Circus -- and together they shed light on the changing nature of Moscow society across the centuries.

The next instalment in a series of successful translated anthologies of stories set in and around a particular European City. Moscow Tales combines two genres, travel writing and literary fiction and provides an insight into the lives of those who live in Moscow or have written about it.

About the Author

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Helen Constantine Helen Constantine taught languages in schools until 2000, when she became a full-time translator. She has published three volumes of translated stories, Paris Tales, French Tales, and Paris Metro Tales and is currently editing a series of 'City Tales' for Oxford University Press. She has translated Mademoiselle de Maupin by Theophile Gautier and Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos for Penguin and The Wild Ass's Skin by Balzac for OUP. She is married to the writer David Constantine and with him edits the international magazine Modern Poetry in Translation. Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. She has published three collections of her own poetry -- the most recent of these is Red House (Carcanet / OxfordPoets 2011) -- and two collections of Russian poetry in translation. She works with the Royal Court Theatre in London as an adviser on Russian New Writing and has translated over thirty plays from Russian. She lived in Moscow for five years in the 1990s and frequently returns there. She is currently editor of the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation