Decapolis

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• Publisher: Comma Press
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781910974858
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• Introduction:
• Beginning
• A Man of the Streets
• The First Day of the Fourth Week
• The Inferior Quality of Contemporary Poetry
• From Superwoobinda
• Once in a Lifetime, Man, and After That, Y’Know, F’getit
• The Four Hundred Pleats
• The News and Views
• Something for Nothing
• My Mother’s Men
• Contributors