Search results for ""Influx Press""

Malcolm Devlin''s debut short-fiction collection, first published in 2017, announced the arrival of a major new talent in the worlds of weird fiction and literary horror. In You Will Grow Into Them, change is the only constant. These nine stories tackle the unease of transformation, growth, and change in a world where the mundane is only a veneer hiding the darkness below. Childhood anxieties manifest as degraded doppelgangers; fungal blooms are harvested from the backs of dancers; and lycanthropes become the new social pariahs. In You Will Grow Into Them, the demons we carry inside us are very real indeed.

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Paul, ex-tube driver and drinking partner of legendary Union leader Bob Crowe turns up at Essex University in the early 1980s haunted by the death of his colleague on the tracks. Thrown into the radical mix of Student Union life and the academic intoxication of post-modern theory taught by the likes of Ernesto Laclau, Jaques Derrida and a very young Slavoj Zizek, Paul befriends the novel’s unnamed narrator. What follows is a riotous attempt to put the 20th Century to bed, as seen through the eyes of the foot soldiers of British history. From Miners strikes to IRA collection buckets, ANC demonstrations and some very dodgy handling of Soviet money, Our Struggle climaxes with a devastating denouement in modern day Kurdistan. Holloway’s epic tale asks the big questions, does what we think, what we say and what we do ever match up or are we destined to fall short of the ideals we think we cherish?

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Ten tragicomic tales of environmental and personal disaster from the margins of town and country. A troubled hipster is seduced by an electricity pylon. Sinister omens manifest in a supermarket car park. A motorway bridge becomes a father. Malevolent bacteria plague a polar icebreaker. A bioengineered abomination lurks in a Gloucestershire railway terminus The weekly bin collection pushes a man over the edge. A former squatter clings to her home on a crumbling cliff. Joyriders are foiled by Anglo Saxon floodwaters. Vampiric entities stalk B&Q. And fiery catastrophe comes to the zoo. Gareth E. Rees's first collection of short fiction explores lives on the verge of breakdown, where ordinary people are driven to extremes by the effects of late capitalism and ecological collapse.

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WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JOSEPH O’NEILL Neil is a student at Birmingham University, living a typical life of gigs, clubs, politics, sex. One night, after a row with his lover, Neil follows a stranger onto a canal towpath. The stranger turns on him and attacks, viciously carving up Neil’s face and leaving him mutilated beyond recognition. Neil’s recovery is a journey through surgical reconstruction and sexual alienation. His attempt to track down his attacker becoming a search for his own hidden, destructive self; a search that leads him to question values he had always taken for granted. First published in 2003 and long out-of-print, The Blue Mask is a hardcore emotional trip exploring the trauma of change and the nature of violence and of love.

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Moving into an old and decaying house, Martin Swann discovers a box of video cassettes in the garden shed. One of them is a bootleg copy of a morbid and disturbing film by obscure French director, Jean Rien. The discovery leads Martin on a search for the director's other films, and for a way to understand Rien's filmography, drawing him away from his home and his lover into a shadowy realm of secrets, rituals and creeping decay. An encounter with a crazed film journalist in Gravesend leads to drug-fuelled visions in Paris - and finally to the Mexican desert where a grim revelation awaits. The Witnesses Are Gone is a first-hand account of a journey into the darkest parts of the underworld - a look behind the screen on which our collective nightmares play.

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In the Pines is author Paul Scraton's story of an unnamed narrator's lifelong relationship with the forest and the mysteries it contains, told through fragmented stories that capture the blurred details and sharp focus of memory. Accompanied by eerie images created using a 170-year-old technique of collodion wet plate photography by Eymelt Sehmer, In the Pines is a powerfully evocative collaboration between image and text

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In this dark and toothsome collection, Anna Vaught enters a strange world of apocryphal feasts and disturbing banquets. Famished explores the perils of selfish sensuality and trifle while child rearing, phantom sweetshop owners, the revolting use of sherbet in occult rituals, homicide by seaside rock, and the perversion of Thai Tapas. Once, that is, you've been bled dry from fluted cups by pretty incorporeals and learned about consuming pride in the hungriest of stately homes. Famished: seventeen stories to whet your appetite and ruin your dinner.

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'The problems started the day we moved to Hastings...' When Gareth E. Rees moves to a dilapidated Victorian house in Hastings he begins to piece together an occult puzzle connecting Aleister Crowley, John Logie Baird and the Piltdown Man hoaxer. As freak storms and tidal surges ravage the coast, Rees is beset by memories of his best friend's tragic death in St Andrews twenty years earlier. Convinced that apocalypse approaches and his past is out to get him, Rees embarks on a journey away from his family, deep into history and to the very edge of the imagination. Tormented by possessed seagulls, mutant eels and unresolved guilt, how much of reality can he trust? THE STONE TIDE is a novel about grief, loss, history and the imagination. It is about how people make the place and the place makes the person. Above all it is about the stories we tell to make sense of the world.

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What happens when we leave the places we’re from? What do we lose, who do we become, and what parts of our pasts are unshakeable? Linda Mannheim’s second short story collection tells the stories of twelve people who have relocated – both voluntarily and involuntarily. Opening with the Miami-set thriller 'Noir', these exquisitely rendered stories will leave you reeling. This Way To Departures is a deeply affecting portrait of American society and the constant search for a place to call 'home'.

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In this genre-bending debut collection merging horror, fairy tales, pop culture, and science-fiction, women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies while living in a world among animals', where violence is intertwined with bizarre ecological disruptions.

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Variations is the debut short story collection from one of Britain's most compelling voices, Juliet Jacques. Using fiction inspired by found material and real-life events, Variations explores the history of transgender Britain with lyrical, acerbic wit. Variations travels from Oscar Wilde's London to austerity-era Belfast via inter-war Cardiff, a drag bar in Liverpool just after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, Manchester's protests against Clause 28, and Brighton in the 2000s. Through diary entries of an illicit love affair, an oral history of a contemporary political collective; a 1920s academic paper to a 1990s film script; a 1950s memoir to a series of 2014 blog posts, Jacques rewrites and reinvigorates a history so often relegated to stale police records and sensationalist news headlines. Innovative and fresh, Variations is a bold and beautiful book of stories unheard; until now.

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Carl, reeling from the death of his brother, is drowning in visions. Followed by shadow men through the crumbling outer regions of the city. Unable to trust those closest to him. Doubting his own reality. As a wave of brutal, ritualistic gangland killings sweeps through the underworld, Carl's involvement with a life he thought he had left behind catches up with him, with terrifying results. In the Shadow of the Phosphorous Dawn is the raw, brilliant debut novel from Rob True, operating at the bleeding edge of crime and psychedelic horror.

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An unnamed narrator comes to in a basement, tied to a chair, a man looming over her. Someone has a knife. She emerges from her captivity into a mysterious and nightmarish city, searching for meaning in her new reality. As figures emerge from the night, some offering sanctuary, and others judgement, she moves through a fever-dream narrative of alienation, fear, and the quest for respite. Nour Abi-Nakhoul''s powerful debut novel, Supplication, is a hallucinatory literary horror set deep in the consciousness of a woman exploring a changed and frightening world.

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London, a city of constant transition, transaction, translation. London does not exist; London is a language without a place and it is the aphasic city; it's the mother of all languages. Lucifer Over London is a new anthology nine narrative essays written by a host of international prize-winning authors including Chloe Aridjis, Viola di Grado, Xiaolu Guo, Joanna Walsh and Zinovy Zinik. First published in Italy by Humboldt Books, Lucifer Over London is now appearing in English for the first time. This is a version of London as seen from the immigrants of recent migrations, of deportations to come, from those who create London even as they contradict it.

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Set in a post-industrial landscape of the present, the near future, and the imagined, Joel Lane''s seminal collection The Lost District explores human encounters with the unknown: sexual discovery, drug-inspired visions, the lonely paths of madness, and the shadow realms on the other side of death. A neighbourhood fades into corrupt echoes of itself; a porn actor''s scars reveal the forces controlling his life; a musician is haunted by the madness of a deceased singer; and a man literally follows his ex-lover to the end of the world. Ranging from grim urban horror to strange erotic fantasies to bitter allegories of loss and exploitation, the stories in The Lost District link the hidden places in the urban and small-town landscapes to the secret spaces inside all of us. First published in the USA in 2006, and long out-of-print, The Lost District has never been published in the UK until now, further enforcing Joel Lane''s reputation as one of the most significant and distinctive British

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One November morning, Tom Jeffreys set off from Euston Station with a gnarled old walking stick in his hand and an overloaded rucksack. His aim was to walk the 119 miles from London to Birmingham along the proposed route of HS2. Needless to say, he failed. Over the course of ten days of walking, Jeffreys meets conservationists and museum directors, ery farmers and suicidal retirees. From a rapidly changing London, through interminable suburbia, and out into the English countryside, Jeffreys goes wild camping in Perivale, ees murderous horses in Oxfordshire, and gets lost in a land ll site in Buckinghamshire. Signal Failure weaves together poetry and politics, history, philosophy and personal observation to form an extended exploration of people and place, nature, society, and the future. In part, Signal Failure is the story of the author's multiple shortcomings - his inability to understand the city he lives in, to forge a meaningful relationship with his home-county hometown, to emulate those great nature writers he admires so much, to put up a tent or read a map.It is also a wide-ranging critique of humanity's most urgent failures: of capitalism, of community, of the city and the suburbs, of architecture and agriculture, of bureaucratic democracy, and, in the end, of our age-old failure to nd our place in the world we live in.

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Above Sugar Hill is an unforgettable collection of short stories set in Washington Heights, New York City. Located between 145th and 181st Street - roads no one from outside the neighbourhood is expected to visit. It is a visceral, vital work of site-specific fiction. These tales of New York take place between 1973 and 2001 - a Puerto Rican Independentista fends off the FBI, a young girl spots Marilyn Monroe more than ten years after Monroe's suicide, an opera-singing housing activist goes missing and presumed to have been murdered. Above Sugar Hill is a literary map of Upper Manhattan memories, uncompromising narratives and complicated truths.

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"A return - this seems to be one of the things I'm expected to write about. And now that I return, now that I find myself here, I haven't even left the airport and I'm already toying with the idea of writing a return, perhaps just to surrender." Nine stories. Nine ways of not being at home. Nine confrontations to the limits of fiction and memoir. Jolts is a playful and honest exploration of the joys and sorrows of lives lived in-between places. A collection that travels across time, space, and language, in order to deliver the gospel of the Latin American short story. Sdrigotti rises to peak form with JOLTS, following a series of cult publications - Shitstorm, Dysfunctional Males and Triptico. With this book he joins the likes of Eley Williams and Clare Fisher as another special Influx Press short story writer.

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WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY NINA ALLAN Joel Lane (1963-2013) was one of the UK's foremost writers of dark, unsettling fiction, a frank explorer of sexuality and the transgressive aspects of human nature. With a tight focus on the post-industrial Black Country and his home city of Birmingham, he created a distinct form of British urban weird fiction. His debut collection, The Earth Wire was first published in 1994 by Egerton Press and is reissued in paperback by Influx Press for the first time in over twenty-five years. Love and death. Sex and despair. The Earth Wire is a thrilling, disturbing examination of the means and the cost of survival.

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Cocker spaniel by his side, Gareth E. Rees wanders the marshes of Hackney, Leyton, and Walthamstow, avoiding his family and the pressures of life. He discovers a lost world of Victorian filter plants, ancient grazing lands, dead toy factories and tidal rivers on the edgelands of a rapidly changing city. As strange tales of bears, crocodiles, magic narrowboats, and apocalyptic tribes begin to manifest, Rees embarks on a psychedelic journey across time and into the dark heart of London itself. First published by Influx Press in 2013, Marshland is a deep map of the east London marshes where nothing it as it seems, blending local history, folklore, and weird fiction in a genre-straddling classic of contemporary place writing. This fully revised and expanded 2024 edition features brand-new material and never before-seen photographs from the author''s archive.

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WINNER OF THE 2013 WORLD FANTASY AWARD Episodes from the casebook of a police officer in the West Midlands: A young woman needs help in finding the buried pieces of her lover... so he can return to waking life. Pale-faced thieves gather by a disused railway to watch a puppet theatre of love and violence. Why do local youths keep starting fires in the ash woods around a disused mine in the Black Country? A series of inexplicable deaths uncover a secret cult of machine worship. When a migrant worker disappears, the key suspect is a boy driven mad by memories that are not his own. Among the derelict factories and warehouses at the heart of the city, an archaic god seeks out his willing victims. Blurring the occult detective story with urban noir fiction, Where Furnaces Burn offers a glimpse of the myths and terrors buried within the industrial landscape. First published in 2012, Joel Lane’s World Fantasy Award-winning collection is a true modern classic of weird fiction that cemented his place as one of the most important and distinctive British writers of the weird.

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It is the first day of term at a secondary school on Merseyside, 2001. The Towers are soon to fall. A boy cowers in an alleyway, surrounded by a group clad in black. They whip his bare legs with nettles. This is only the start. As term unfolds, their bullying campaign intensifies. Soon the boy finds solace hiding in marshland under the nearby motorway. Voices there urge council with Grannies Rock, a strange stone that sits on derelict land known as The Breck. There, the whispers in the breeze promise a terrible revenge. Twenty years later, the boy has grown. He is back home from London to pack away his childhood. Armed with a Polaroid camera, he aims to exorcise those painful memories through a series of photographs. But is his memory of what happened reliable? Nettles is a powerful exploration of memory and violence, excavating the stories we tell ourselves to escape our past.

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Isabelle is alone in Strasbourg. The day after her partner leaves to travel abroad, she receives news of her father's suicide, his body found hanging in a park back home in Crystal Palace. Isabelle misses her flight back to London and a new university job, opting to stay in her partner's empty flat over the winter. Obsessed with the many strange coincidences in Strasbourg's turbulent history, Isabelle seeks to slowly dissolve into the past, succumbing to visions and dreams as she develops her meticulous research about the city. Stalked by the unnerving spirit of the Erl-King she fears something else has died along with her father; the spectres of Europe communicating a hidden truth beneath the melancholy. How Pale the Winter Has Made Us rummages through the crumbling ruins of a life, building cartographies of place and death under a darkening sky.

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Car parks: commonplace urban landscapes, little-explored and rarely featured in art and music, yet they shape the aesthetics of our towns and cities. Hotspots for crime, rage and sexual deviancy; a blind spot in which activities go unnoticed. Skateboarding, car stunts, drug dealing, dogging, murder. Gareth E. Rees believes that the retail car park has as much mystery, magic and terror as any mountain, meadow or wood. He's out to prove it by walking the car parks of Britain, journeying across the country from Plymouth to Edinburgh, much to the horror of his family, friends - and, most of all - himself. He finds Sir Francis Drake outside B&Q, standing stones in a retail park, and a dead body beside Sainsbury's. In this darkly satirical work of non-fiction, Gareth E. Rees presents a troubling vision of Brexit Britain through a common space we know far less about than we think.

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"We architects must be idealists. We construct not just individual buildings, but whole cities. We plan cities, and in doing so, change lives." Plastic Emotions is a novel based on the true life story of Minnette de Silva -forgotten feminist icon and the first female Sri Lankan architect. In a gripping, elegant and lyrical story, Shiromi Pinto paints a complex picture of de Silva, charting her affair with infamous Swiss modernist Le Corbusier and her efforts to build a post-independence Sri Lanka that is heading towards political and religious turmoil. Moving between London, Chandigarh, Colombo, Paris and Kandy, at a time of communal violence in Sri Lanka, the rise of the civil war, and troubles with building a brand new city in north India, Plastic Emotions explores the life of a young, trailblazing south Asian woman at a time of great political turbulence across the globe.

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After slipping through the cracks of modern life and into the amoral underground beyond work-a-day society, George F finds himself at the heart of London's political frontline, where anarchy, alcohol and addiction stalk the streets of a different city to the one you know. From life on the street to behind the barricades, from the occupation of derelict buildings to inevitable evictions and confrontation with law and order, from euphoria to despair, Total Shambles follows the journey of an idealistic writer as he tries to thrive and survive in the contentious world of squatting in London.

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Birmingham, early 1990s. Triangle are a cult act on the post-punk scene, led by brilliant and troubled vocalist Karl - a man haunted by past violence and present danger, torn between fame and oblivion, men and women, music and silence. Triangle's bass player, David, is struggling to make sense of Karl's reality as the band start to make waves in the music scene and Karl starts to come apart in a blur of sex and drinking. First published in 2000, Joel Lane's debut novel From Blue to Black is a story of passion, blood and alcohol, broken strings and broken lives - a piercing voyage through our musical and political past that cuts to the bone.

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In this highly accessible, entertaining and provocative work of non-fiction Kevin Brazil combines essay and memoir to ask one of the most pertinent questions of our current age, ‘whatever happened to queer happiness?’ Exploring the lives of artists and writers from the past, current discourse around queerness and his own experiences, Brazil argues that art and literature needs to move away from celebrating the pain of queerness and embracing all the positive, ecstatic, collective joy that queer culture produces. Brazil’s enlivening ideas around queerness combat the isolation of individuality and shame, instead championing collectivity, commonality, and visions of shared pleasure; offering both critique and a way of remaking the world. A timely, eminently readable and fascinating book for all readers of creative non-fiction, Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness? is a work of literature that will reverberate for years to come.

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Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Olga receives a phone call from a man she thought she'd never hear from again. Her life has changed since their childhood together in the Soviet Union. She has settled down with a girl she loves and has moved on from her previous life. Answering the call opens a Pandora's box of haunting memories and unsolved puzzles: an unexplained murder in her childhood block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. In the search for answers, Olga uncovers an underground midwestern Russian mafia, and a string of connected stabbings, all of which seem irrevocably linked to her past, threatening the life she has created for herself. In A Door Behind a Door, Yelena Moskovich continues her exploration of the post-Soviet diaspora, through a mesmeric blending of past and present, desire and violence

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Lori works illegally in a rented flat in central London, living in fear of police raids which could mean losing her small daughter and her dream of a new life. Freya is a student who finds she can make far more money as an escort than she could in an office; life, after all, is already a tangle of madness and dissociation. And Paula is a journalist whose long-term campaign against prostitution has brought her some strange bedfellows. After a shock change to the law, with brothels being raided by the authorities, lives across the country are fractured. As a threat from Lori's past begins to catch up with her, the three women are increasingly, inevitably drawn into each other's orbit The Service is a powerful and challenging novel about women's bodies, sex and relationships, mental health, entitlement, authenticity, privilege and power - as shocking as any dystopia, but touching and deeply humane.

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Andie can see no other way to escape a wedding than by hiding in a tree. Esther starts a new life in a King's Cross hotel with a bad-tempered ventriloquist dummy, while Gina finally leaves a group of infuriating friends - but not before providing them with a suitable replacement. Ways of Living is Gemma Seltzer's keen exploration of what it means to be a modern woman inhabiting the urban landscape. Ten stories of ordinary women going to extraordinary lengths to be understood, acting in bold and unpredictable ways as they map their identities onto London's streets. How do we speak and listen to each other? Who gets to talk? And what is the true power of quiet in a noisy world?

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Vincent wakes up in an apartment in New York City with no recollection of having arrived there. Back in the UK, his girlfriend, Emily, has been murdered. Guided by mysterious phone calls which lead him to a series of clues, he soon suspects he has travelled to New York to find Emily's killer. Meanwhile, an explicit video Emily made is going viral. When she shared it with Davison in a private forum, she never expected him to upload it. But she's only ever spoken to him online, and he might not be who he says he is. Framed by footnotes and annotations written by Ike A. Mafar and author Steve Hollyman, Esc&Ctrl is a metafictional murder mystery examining the loss of identity in the virtual world of the Internet; a self-begetting novel for the 21st Century.

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The year 2036; in a broken down and dysfunctional post-Federal America, Ex-Marine Frank Dubois journeys from LA to Detroit on a mission to find redemption from his past actions in the 20 year Syrian war. In present day Hollywood, a British film director hustles to get his movie made in a cut throat and sycophantic business. Somehow, these two worlds collide. Bindlestiff begins with a simple image of a man mending the hole in his shoe with some glue and a cut off piece of rubber. And from there explodes into a broiling satire on race, identity, family, friendship, war, peace, sex, drugs but precious little rock and roll. Part screenplay, part novel, Bindlestiff is about the power of storytelling and how we use narratives to make sense of the world. "If it's broke, fix it."

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A groundbreaking voice in contemporary Latin American literature, María Fernanda Ampuero confronts machismo, inequity, and violence in her latest short story collection. An undocumented woman answers a job posting only to find herself held hostage, a group of outcasts obsess over popular boys drowned while surfing, and two girls suspect sinister behavior from the missionaries lodging in their home. Simultaneously terrifying and exquisite, Human Sacrifices is “tropical gothic” at its finest. Ampuero considers the decay and oppression beneath the surface of our humid and hostile world, where those on the margins must pay the price for the comfort and safety of the elite. These twelve stories contemplate the nature of exploitation and abuse, illuminating the realities of those society consumes and leaves behind.

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Simon and Marie can't seem to have a baby. They decide to flee the city for an idyllic village, where things, they tell themselves, must be better. But their new home is gloomy, threatening, tinged with tragedy - things have not been the same since the factory closed down and the broadcast antenna was erected. In the trees, no birds are singing, and people have started disappearing... The Country Will Bring Us No Peace is celebrated Quebecois author Matthieu Simard's first work to be translated into English and published in the UK; a strange and poignant novella exploring grief and its aftermath.

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A pregnant woman takes the ferry to the UK. A fractious intimate relationship develops between an Irish woman, an English man, and her girlfriend. Two ungendered characters contest the same female body. A deserted wife takes a lover but remains unsatisfied. Lauren Foley's debut collection of dramatic short stories, Polluted Sex, is fearless in its depiction of women's bodies and sexuality, offering an unflinching window into Irish girl and womanhood.

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Obsessed by her encounters with the mysterious green women, and haunted by the Garonne River, a nameless narrator seeks them out in La Roele, Paris, Marseille, and Ouagadougou. Each encounter reveals different aspects of the women; real or imagined, dead or alive, seductive or suicidal, driving the narrator deeper into her obsession, in this unsettling exploration of identity, memory and paranoia. Self Portrait in Green is the multi-prize winning, Marie NDiaye's brilliant subversion of the memoir. Written in diary entries, with lyrical prose and dreamlike imagery, we start with and return to the river, which mirrors the narrative by posing more questions than it answers.

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Named one of the ten best fiction books of 2018 by the New York Times en Espanol, Cockfight is the debut work by Ecuadorian writer and journalist Maria Fernanda Ampuero. In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of the home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family's maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, characters spend their lives trapped reenacting their past traumas. Heralding a brutal and singular new voice, Cockfight explores the power of the home to both create and destroy those within it.

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Man Hating Psycho is the caustic new collection of stories from visionary writer Iphgenia Baal. Interrogating the disconnect between our public identities and real-life selves, Baal exposes the inherent duplicity of online communication. Text messages relaying deep personal crisis are nothing more than an annoyance, WhatsApp takedowns of wide-eyed left-wingers unfold at breakneck speed, friendships that seem set in stone disintegrate at the first hint of sex, the language of love degraded as life becomes more and more transactional. With black and disquieting humour, thirteen playful texts disparage the highly-profitable superstitions that are the scaffolding of our current social order. Man Hating Psycho lays bare the trappings of modern life, whilst putting the short story form through a literary mincer.

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Shaun wakes up in hospital after a fight in a local nightclub and discovers his girlfriend has been assaulted. Ade and Colbeck were there that night - the climax to weeks of escalating violence, their two-man vigilante mission to kick back against a broken generation. A misguided plan to combat the lairies that blight Britain's bars, pubs and streets. What really happened? And how did it come to this? LAIRIES is the brilliant and brutal debut from Steve Hollyman, mapping the lives of violent young men at the start of the twenty-first century, living aimlessly but desperately hunting for purpose. Hollyman speaks to the heart of small-town Britain, offering scathing insight into masculinity, class, and the bleak realities of a man's aimless early twenties, lifting the lid on a world most would rather ignore.

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Joel Lane (1963-2013) was one of the UK’s foremost writers of dark, unsettling fiction, a frank explorer of sexuality and the transgressive aspects of human nature. With a tight focus on the post-industrial Black Country and his home city of Birmingham, he created a distinct form of British urban weird fiction. Scar City is one of the final collections put together before his death in 2013 – with his home city of Birmingham as their nucleus, these are intense, haunting and often painful stories from a master of the short form. WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY NICHOLAS ROYLE

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A lonely woman invites danger between tedious dates; a station guard plays a bloody game of heads-or-tails; an office cleaner sneaks into a forbidden room hiding grim secrets. Compelling and provocative, Annabel Banks's debut short fiction collection draws deeply upon the human need to be in control - no matter how devastating the cost.

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In 2011 Cristian Aliaga, journalist, academic, and one of Argentina's foremost contemporary poets, left Patagonia to take a journey through the UK and continental Europe. Aliaga travelled to places that exist and do not exist: former mining communities, destroyed in the 1980s; identikit towns with their franchise high streets; run-down suburban railway stations; and the open spaces of the Yorkshire moors. He visited sites of conflict, like the Falls Road in Belfast, places of poetic significance, including Dylan Thomas's house and the centres of "Western" culture that those from the edge of the world are told to admire. So long the object of foreign gazes or described by others, this was the chance for Patagonia to talk back to the centre. The stories that he tells inspire and devastate, reflecting our cultures back to us from a different perspective.

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The histories of the trans and sex worker rights movements are closely intertwined and, particularly in the UK, it's rare to find a carceral feminist who isn't also a rabid transphobe. What does it mean to write as part of a community that is under attack? Where, in fiction, is the line between exploring harmful ideology and humanising it? In Morbid Obsessions Alison Rumfitt and Frankie Miren explore these questions and talk about the crossover in the ways they chose to approach them in their novels Tell Me I'm Worthless (Cipher Press) and The Service (Influx Press), covering the pornographic interest in sex workers and trans women, online violence, moral panic, creative representation, and paying tribute to sex worker and trans activism through fiction. Frank, funny, and hopeful, and featuring two new stories, an introduction by writer and historian Morgan M. Page, and an interview with Natalia Santana Mendes, Morbid Obsessions is an urgent and vital conversation about making art as collective struggle. All proceeds (after production costs) from the sale of this book will be donated to Babeworld, a collective which seeks to create a more representative art world, and will go into direct grants to marginalised artists.

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