Search results for ""Comma Press""
Comma Press The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction
At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place - a naive book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time... The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people's company. As one character puts it, 'The world is full of delicious things, you know.'
£13.41
Comma Press The Iraqi Christ
From legends of the desert to horrors of the forest, Blasim's stories blend the fantastic with the everyday, the surreal with the all-too-real. Taking his cues from Kafka, his prose shines a dazzling light into the dark absurdities of Iraq's recent past and the torments of its countless refugees. The subject of this, his second collection, is primarily trauma and the curious strategies human beings adopt to process it (including, of course, fiction). The result is a masterclass in metaphor - a new kind of story-telling, forged in the crucible of war, and just as shocking.
£13.41
Comma Press Moss Witch: And Other Stories
Each story in Sara Maitland’s collection enacts a daring kind of alchemy, fusing together raw elements of scientific theory with ancient myth, folkloric archetype and contemporary storytelling. All the more remarkable is that each of these stories sprang from a conversation with a scientist and grew directly out of cutting-edge research.
£12.53
Comma Press Hitting Trees with Sticks
£13.04
Comma Press You Have 24 Hours to Love Us
£12.66
Comma Press The BBC National Short Story Award 2024
£11.63
Comma Press Tomato Cain: And Other Stories
Originally published in 1949, Tomato Cain and Other Stories is the sole collection of short fiction by Nigel Kneale. Drawing on his experiences of growing up on the Isle of Man, many of Kneale's tales conjure up a remote, old-fashioned community where mythology and superstition are part of everyday life. Several stories go further, making imaginative leaps into the kind of weird, eerie territory with which Kneale would go on to make his name, as the writer of TV's Quatermass, The Road, Beasts and The Stone Tape. Though garlanded with praise on publication - it won its author the 1950 Somerset Maugham Award - Tomato Cain has long since been out of print. This new edition is published to mark the centenary of Kneale's birth, uniting the stories from both the original UK and US editions for the first time ever. It's sure to delight Kneale's legions of fans and indeed all admirers of skilfully-crafted short stories.
£20.56
Comma Press Conradology: A Celebration of the Work of Joseph Conrad
Born in what is now Ukraine to Polish parents, naturalised as a British citizen, and schooled on the high seas of international commerce, Joseph Conrad was a true citizen of the world. His novels bore witness to the dehumanising repercussions of empire, explored a world in which state-sponsored terrorism ruined individuals' lives, and pioneered complex narrative structures and subjective points-of-view in what was to become the first wave of literary modernism. To mark his 160th birthday, 14 authors and critics from Britain, Poland and elsewhere have come together to celebrate his legacy with new pieces of fiction and non-fiction. Conrad felt that the writer's task was to offer 'that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.' In an age of increasing isolationism, these celebrations remind you of the value of such glimpses. Commissioned as part of the Joseph Conrad Year 2017.
£12.53
Comma Press The Stone Thrower
This is the much-anticipated second collection of short stories by the award-winning author of 'Instruction Manual for Swallowing'.
£12.53
Comma Press Tea at the Midland: and Other Stories
The characters in David Constantine’s fourth collection are delicately caught in moments of defiance. These bewitching, finely-wrought stories give us permission to escape, side-step the inexorable traffic of our lives, and take possession of the moment by marking out a space for resistance.
£12.53
Comma Press Don't Look Left: A Diary of Genocide
On October 7, Israeli territory around the Erez border of Gaza Strip was invaded in a surprise attack by Hamas's Al Qassam Brigades. In response to this, the people of Gaza have been subjected to nearly three months of wholesale genocide. Over 20,000 civilians have been killed, an estimated million made homeless and displaced, tens of thousands injured, and an entire population traumatised. Never in living history has such an atrocity been perpetrated in plain sight of the world's leaders and mainstream media, who have all somehow managed to give it their complete backing. Images and video clips of hourly horrors and tragedies have spread around the world, combatted by fake news propagated not by dark conspiratorial corners on the web, but by corporate media outlets and politicians. Baseless Israeli propaganda and deliberately-biased framing has been fed to journalists and repeated, without question, on the front pages of the world's newspapers and in the mouths of TV pundits and politicians. One of the few voices of Gaza to make it out into Western media has been that of writer Atef Abu Saif', whose diary entries have been occasionally serialised (with edits and framing) in places like The New York Times, Washington Post, Le Monde and elsewhere. Here, the complete, unedited diaries show the journey of a man who arrived in Gaza just a few days before October 7 as a government minister and ended the period, like most other Palestinians, living in a tent in a refugee camp. If we allow our understanding of world events to be corrupted and spun by lazy, compliant journalism, we will never understand them, even those happening in real-time, before our very eyes. These diaries give us a rare exit ramp from this state of ignorance. WITH A FOREWORD BY PULITZER PRIZE WINNER CHRIS HEDGES
£14.31
Comma Press The American Way: Stories of Invasion
Covering US foreign policy from 1945 to the present day, an anthology of specially commissioned stories by authors from across the globe addressing America's history of intervention.
£12.53
Comma Press The Book of Ramallah: A City in Short Fiction
Unlike most other Palestinian cities, Ramallah is a relatively new town, a de facto capital of the West Bank allowed to thrive after the Oslo Peace Accords, but just as quickly hemmed in and suffocated by the Occupation as the Accords have failed. Perched along the top of a mountainous ridge, it plays host to many contradictions: traditional Palestinian architecture jostling against aspirational developments and cultural initiatives, a thriving nightlife in one district, with much more conservative, religious attitudes in the next. Most striking however - as these stories show - is the quiet dignity, resilience and humour of its people; citizens who take their lives into their hands every time they travel from one place to the next, who continue to live through countless sieges, and yet still find the time, and resourcefulness, to create. Translated by Basma Ghalayini, Alexander Hong, Thoraya El-Rayyes, Mohammed Ghalaieny, Raph Cormack, Adam Talib, Yasmine Seale, Andrew Leber, Emre Bennett & Raph Cohen.
£13.41
Comma Press The American Way: Stories of Invasion
Following the US's bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the scenes of chaos at Kabul Airport, we could be forgiven for thinking we're experiencing an 'end of empire' moment, that the US is entering a new, less belligerent era in its foreign policy, and that its tenure as self-appointed 'global policeman' is coming to an end. Before we get our hopes up though, it's wise to remember exactly what this policeman has done, for the world, and ask whether it's likely to change its behaviour after any one setback. After 75 years of war, occupation, and political interference - installing dictators, undermining local political movements, torturing enemies, and assisting in the arrest of opposition leaders (from OEcalan to Mandela) - the US military-industrial complex doesn't seem to know how to stop. This anthology explores the human cost of these many interventions onto foreign soil, with stories by writers from that soil - covering everything from torture in Abu Ghraib, to coups and counterrevolutionary wars in Latin America, to all-out invasions in the Middle and Far East. Alongside testimonies from expert historians and ground-breaking journalists, these stories present a history that too many of us in the West simply pretend never happened. This new anthology re-examines this history with stories that explore the human cost of these interventions on foreign soil, by writers from that soil. From nuclear testing in the Pacific, to human testing of CIA torture tactics, from coups in Latin America, to all-out invasions in the Middle and Far East; the atrocities that follow are often dismissed in history books as inevitable in the 'fog of war'. By presenting them from indigenous, grassroots perspectives, accompanied by afterwords by the historians that consulted on them, this book attempts to bring some clarity back to that history.
£16.99
Comma Press The Dressing-Up Box
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.
£12.53
Comma Press Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe
‘To be European,’ writes Leïla Slimani, ‘is to believe that we are, at once, diverse and united, that the Other is different but equal.’ Despite these high ideals, however, there is a growing sense that Europe needs to be fixed, or at the least seriously rethought. The clamour of rising nationalism – alongside widespread feelings of disenfranchisement – needs to be addressed if the dreams of social cohesion, European integration, perhaps even democracy are to be preserved. This anthology brings together 28 acclaimed women writers, artists, scientists and entrepreneurs from across the continent to offer new perspectives on the future of Europe, and how it might be rebuilt. Featuring essays, fictions and short plays, Europa28 asks what it means to be European today and demonstrates – with clarity and often humour – how women really do see things differently.
£15.20
Comma Press Refugee Tales: Volume III: 3
With nationalism and the far right on the rise across Europe and North America, there has never been a more important moment to face up to what we, in Britain, are doing to those who seek sanctuary. Still the UK detains people indefinitely under immigration rules. Bail hearings go unrecorded, people are picked up without notice, individuals feel abandoned in detention centres with no way of knowing when they will be released. In Refugee Tales III we read the stories of people who have been through this process, many of whom have yet to see their cases resolved and who live in fear that at any moment they might be detained again. Poets, novelists and writers have once again collaborated with people who have experienced detention, their tales appearing alongside first-hand accounts by people who themselves have been detained. What we hear in these stories are the realities of the hostile environment, the human costs of a system that disregards rights, that denies freedoms and suspends lives.
£14.85
Comma Press The BBC National Short Story Award 2016
One of the most prestigious awards for the short story has reached its eleventh year. Hugely successful, the BBC National Short Story Award, in partnership with Booktrust, awards 15,000 to the winning author, with 3000 going to the runner-up."
£10.74
Comma Press Refugee Tales: Volume II: 2
Upon changing his religion, a young man is denounced as an apostate and flees his country hiding in the back of a freezer lorry… After years of travelling and losing almost everything – his country, his children, his wife, his farm – an Afghan man finds unexpected warmth and comfort in a stranger’s home... A student protester is forced to leave his homeland after a government crackdown, and spends the next 25 years in limbo, trapped in the UK asylum system... Modelled on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the second volume of Refugee Tales sets out to communicate the experiences of those who, having sought asylum in the UK, find themselves indefinitely detained. Here, poets and novelists create a space in which the stories of those who have been detained can be safely heard, a space in which hospitality is the prevailing discourse and listening becomes an act of welcome.
£12.53
Comma Press The Book of Rio: A City in Short Fiction
This anthology brings together ten short stories that go beyond the postcards and snapshots, and introduce us to real residents of Rio – young dancers training to be the next stars of samba, exhausted labourers press-ganged into meeting an impossible deadline, nostalgic drag queens… that make Rio the ‘marvellous city’ it is.
£12.53
Comma Press The Drone Eats with Me: Diaries from a City Under Fire
On 7 July 2014, in an apparent response to the murder of three teenagers, Israel launched a major offensive against the Gaza Strip, lasting 51 days, killing 2145 Palestinians (578 of them children), injuring over 11,000, and demolishing 17,200 homes. The usual news machine rolled up, and the same distressing images and entrenched political rhetoric were broadcast, yet almost nothing was reported of the on-going lives of ordinary Gazans – the real victims of the war. One of the few voices to make it out was that of Atef Abu Saif, a writer and teacher from Jabalia Refugee Camp, whose eye-witness accounts (published in The Guardian, The New York Times, and elsewhere) offered a rare window into the conflict for Western readers. Here, Atef’s complete diaries of the war allow us to witness the full extent of last summer’s atrocities from the most humble of perspectives: that of a young father, fearing for his family’s safety, trying to stay sane in an insanely one-sided war.
£14.31
Comma Press Iraq+100: Stories from a Century After the Invasion
Iraq + 100 poses a question to contemporary Iraqi writers: what might your home city look like in the year 2103 - exactly 100 years after the disastrous American and British-led invasion of Iraq? How might that war reach across a century of repair and rebirth, and affect the state of the country - its politics, its religion, its language, its culture - and how might Iraq have finally escaped its chaos, and found its own peace, a hundred years down the line? As well as being an exercise in escaping the politics of the present, this anthology is also an opportunity for a hotbed of contemporary Arabic writers to offer its own spin on science fiction and fantasy.
£13.41
Comma Press Morphologies: Short Story Writers on Short Story Writers
What makes for a good short story? Being short, you might think the storys structure would yield an answer to this question more readily than, say, the novel. But for as long as the short story has been around, arguments have raged as to what it should and shouldnt be made up of, what it should and shouldnt do. Here,15 leading contemporary practitioners offer structural appreciations of past masters of the form as well as their own perspectives on what the short story does so well. The best short stories dont have closure, argues one contributor, because life doesnt have closure; plot must be written with the denouement constantly in view, quotes another. Covering a century of writing that arguably saw all the major short forms emerge, from Hawthornes Twice Told Tales to Kafkas modernist nightmares, these essays offer new and unique inroads into classic texts, both for the literature student and aspiring writer.
£12.53
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Carcanet Press Ltd Bracket A New Generation in Fiction An Anthology of Short Stories
This is the third anthology in the series from Comma Press.
£13.69
Flapjack Press Petroleuse
Challenging oppression with objectivity and prejudice with passion, feminist activist and poet Steph Pike confronts the politics of social, economic and gender inequality with a viscerally charged and indisputable truth. Includes a Foreword by Rosie Garland. Adult poetry / LGBTQ+ "Seawater floods the city streets, petrol and sweat scent the air. This is salty back-pocket semaphore, full of fury and love, for all those in need of hope." - Michelle Green, author of Jebel Marra [Comma Press] "Steph Pike's poems are like that one person at the party you know you can have a real conversation with." - Helen Mort, Derbyshire Poet Laureate "An invitation to the voiceless to know they, too, can speak." - Rebecca Bilkau, Beautiful Dragons Press "Steph Pike is indeed a pétroleuse of furious, exquisite, necessary language: setting fires of declamation for those stripped of their voice and unmasking patriarchy's creeping dystopian gaze by poking it eloquently in the eye." - Lucy Lepchani, poet, writer & educator
£9.65
Comma Press Resist: Stories of Uprising
In the wake of the social and political turmoil of Brexit and a climate crisis that continues to be ignored, it's easy to think these are uncharted waters for us, as a democracy. But Britain has seen political crises and far-right extremism before. In this timely collection of fiction and essays celebrating key moments of British protest, writers fight back with well-researched, historically accurate fiction. From Boudica to Blair Peach, from the Battle of Cable Street to the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, these stories demonstrate when people have stood up and resisted in the face of injustice. In our age of fake news and post-truth politics, Britons still know when to draw the line and say '¡No pasarán!'
£16.99
Comma Press Cold Sea Stories
A student pedals an old Ukrainian bicycle between striking factories delivering bulletins in the tumultuous first days of the Polish Solidarity movement; a shepherd watches, unseen, as a strange figure disembarks from a pirate ship to bury a chest on the beach; a prisoner in a Berber dungeon recounts his life's story--the failed pursuit of the world's very first language--by scrawling in the sand on his cell floor. The characters in this mesmerizing short story collection find themselves, willingly or not, at the heart of epic narratives. Against such backdrops as the Baltic coast, Kashubian folklore, Chinese mysticism, and the 9/11 attacks, this book centers around the vision of the refugee: be it the Chechen woman carrying her newborn child across the Polish border, the survivor of the Gulag reappearing on his friends' doorstep, or the stranger who befriends the sole resident of a ghostly Mennonite village in the final days of World War II. Offering insight into Polish and Jewish sociopolitical history, this collection is written in the style and traditions of Polish literature.
£12.53
Comma Press Instruction Manual for Swallowing
Robotic insects, in-growing cutlery, flesh-serving waiters in a zombie cafe… Welcome to the surreal, misshapen universe of Adam Marek’s debut collection; a bestiary of hybrids from the techno-crazed future and mythical past; a users’ guide to the seemingly obvious (and the world of illogic implicit within it). Whether fantastical or everyday in setting, Marek’s stories lead us down to the engine room just beneath modern consciousness, a place of both atavism and familiarity, where the body is fluid, the spirit mechanised, and beasts often tell us more about our humanity than anything we can teach ourselves.
£13.41
Comma Press God 99
Chess-playing people-traffickers, suicidal photographers, absurdist sound sculptors, cat-loving rebel sympathisers, murderous storytellers... The characters in Hassan Blasim’s debut novel are not the inventions of a wild imagination, but real-life refugees and people whose lives have been devastated by war. Interviewed by Hassan Owl, an aspiring Iraq-born writer, they become the subjects of an online art project, a blog that blurs the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, reportage and the novel. Framed by an email correspondence with the mysterious Alia, a translator of the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, the project leads us through the bars, brothels and bathhouses of Hassan’s past and present in a journey of trauma, violence, identity and desire. Taking its conceit from the Islamic tradition that says God has 99 names, the novel trains a kaleidoscopic lens on the multiplicity of experiences behind Europe’s so-called ‘migrant crisis’, and asks how those who have been displaced might find themselves again.
£12.53
Comma Press In Another Country: Selected Stories
The stories of David Constantine are unlike any others. His characters possess you instantly, making you see the world as they do – sometimes as exiles, driven into isolation by convictions that even they don’t fully understand; sometimes as carriers of an unspoken but unbearable weight. The things they pursue, or evade, are often unseen and at a distance – like the perfectly preserved body of a woman in the title story, waiting to be discovered in the receding ice of a Swiss glacier. These tokens of the past, or future, haunt Constantine’s characters, but the landscapes that produce them also offer salvation, places of refuge or small treasures to take solace in – like the piece of driftwood a beachcomber chooses to carve into his idea of perfection. Gathering together stories from over two decades of writing, this selection demonstrates why Constantine has been hailed as ‘perhaps the finest of contemporary writers in this form’. Their bewitching and urgent language is at one and the same time unsettling and ‘strong enough to help’. Featuring the story, 'In Another Country', that inspired the motion picture, 45 Years.
£12.53
