Search results for ""Comma Press""
Comma Press The Book of Tehran: A City in Short Fiction
A city of stories – short, fragmented, amorphous, and at times contradictory – Tehran is an impossible tale to tell. For the capital city of one of the most powerful nations in the Middle East, its literary output is rarely acknowledged in the West. This unique celebration of its writing brings together ten stories exploring the tensions and pressures that make the city what it is: tensions between the public and the private, pressures from without – judgemental neighbours, the expectations of religion and society – and from within – family feuds, thwarted ambitions, destructive relationships. The psychological impact of these pressures manifests in different ways: a man wakes up to find a stranger relaxing in his living room and starts to wonder if this is his house at all; a struggling writer decides only when his girlfriend breaks his heart will his work have depth... In all cases, coping with these pressures leads us, the readers, into an unexpected trove of cultural treasures – like the burglar, in one story, descending into the basement of a mysterious antique collector’s house – treasures of which we, in the West, are almost wholly ignorant.
£12.82
Comma Press The BBC National Short Story Award 2022
The BBC NSSA is one of the most prestigious prizes for a single short story, with the winning author receiving GBP15,000, and four further shortlisted authors GBP600 each.
£10.45
Comma Press The Book of Sheffield: A City in Short Fiction
Known for both its industrial roots and arboreal abundance, Sheffield has always been a city of two halves. From elegant parks and gardens to brutalist high-rise estates and the hinterland nightclubs of 'Centertainment', it is a city caught between the forges of the past and the melting pot of the present. Bringing together new short stories from some of the city's most celebrated writers, The Book of Sheffield traces the contours of this complex landscape from both sides of the economic dividing line. From the aspirations of young creatives, ultimately driven to leave, to the more immediate demands of refugees, scrap metal collectors, and student radicals, these stories offer ten different look-out points from which to gaze down on the ever-changing face of the 'Steel City'.
£12.02
Comma Press Palestine +100: Stories from a century after the Nakba
Palestine + 100 poses a question to twelve Palestinian writers: what might your country look like in the year 2048 - a century after the tragedies and trauma of what has come to be called the Nakba? How might this event - which, in 1948, saw the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes - reach across a century of occupation, oppression, and political isolation, to shape the country and its people? Will a lasting peace finally have been reached, or will future technology only amplify the suffering and mistreatment of Palestinians? Covering a range of approaches - from SF noir, to nightmarish dystopia, to high-tech farce - these stories use the blank canvas of the future to reimagine the Palestinian experience today. Along the way, we encounter drone swarms, digital uprisings, time-bending VR, peace treaties that span parallel universes, and even a Palestinian superhero, in probably the first anthology of science fiction from Palestine ever.
£12.82
Comma Press You Should Come with Me Now: Stories of Ghosts
M. John Harrison is a cartographer of the liminal. His work sits at the boundaries between genres - horror and science fiction, fantasy and travel writing - just as his characters occupy the no man's land between the spatial and the spiritual. Here, in his first collection of short fiction for over 15 years, we see the master of the New Wave present unsettling visions of contemporary urban Britain, as well as supernatural parodies of the wider, political landscape. From gelatinous aliens taking over the world's financial capitals, to the middle-aged man escaping the pressures of fatherhood by going missing in his own house... these are weird stories for weird times.
£12.02
Comma Press Refugee Tales
Two unaccompanied children travel across the Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat that has been designed to only make it halfway across... A 63-year-old man is woken one morning by border officers 'acting on a tip-off' and, despite having paid taxes for 28 years, is suddenly cast into the detention system with no obvious means of escape... An orphan whose entire life has been spent in slavery - first on a Ghanaian farm, then as a victim of trafficking - writes to the Home Office for help, only to be rewarded with a jail sentence and indefinite detention... These are not fictions. Nor are they testimonies from some distant, brutal past, but the frighteningly common experiences of Europe's new underclass - its refugees. While those with "citizenship" enjoy basic human rights (like the right not to be detained without charge for more than 14 days), people seeking asylum can be suspended for years in Kafka-esque uncertainty. Here, poets and novelists retell the stories of individuals who have direct experience of Britain's policy of indefinite immigration detention. Presenting their accounts anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims' stories in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering.
£11.24
Comma Press The Sea Cloak
The Sea Cloak is a collection of 11 stories by the author, journalist, and campaigner, Nayrouz Qarmout. Drawing from her own experiences growing up in a Syrian refugee camp, as well as her current life in Gaza, these stories stitch together a patchwork of different perspectives into what it means to be a woman in Palestine today. Whether following the daily struggles of orphaned children fighting to survive in the rubble of recent bombardments, or mapping the complex, cultural tensions between different generations of refugees in wider Gazan society, these stories offer rare insights into one of the most talked about, but least understood cities in the Middle East. Taken together, the collection affords us a local perspective on a global story, and it does so thanks to a cast of (predominantly female) characters whose vantage point is rooted, firmly, in that most cherished of things, the home. Translated from the Arabic by Perween Richards.
£12.02
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.
£11.24
Comma Press The New Abject: Tales of Modern Unease
SOMETHING HAS FALLEN AWAY. We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject. Following the success of Comma’s award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject – Julia Kristeva’s theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Georges Bataille’s societal equivalent – with visceral stories of modern unease. As we become ever-more isolated by social media bubbles, or the demands for social distancing, our moral gag-reflex is increasingly sensitised, and our ability to tolerate difference, or ‘the other’, atrophies. Like all good horror writing, these stories remind us that exposure to what unsettles us, even in small doses, is always better than pretending it doesn’t exist. After all, we can never be wholly free of that which belongs to us.
£11.24
Comma Press The Madman of Freedom Square
From hostage-video makers in Baghdad, to human trafficking in the forests of Serbia, institutionalised paranoia in the Saddam years, to the nightmares of an exile trying to embrace a new life in Amsterdam... Blasim’s stories present an uncompromising view of the West's relationship with Iraq, spanning over twenty years and taking in everything from the Iran-Iraq War through to the Occupation, as well as offering a haunting critique of the post-war refugee experience. Blending allegory with historical realism, and subverting readers’ expectations in an unflinching comedy of the macabre, these stories manage to be both phantasmagoric and shockingly real, light in touch yet steeped in personal nightmare. For all their despair and darkness, though, what lingers more than the haunting images of war, or the insanity of those who would benefit from it, is the spirit of defiance, the indefatigable courage of those few characters keeping faith with what remains of human intelligence. Together these stories represent the first major literary work about the war from an Iraqi perspective.
£12.02
Comma Press The New Uncanny: Tales of Unease
In 1919 Sigmund Freud published an essay that delved deep into the tradition of horror writing and claimed to understand one of its darkest tricks. Like a mad scientist, he performed literary vivisection on a still-breathing body of work, exploring its inner anatomy, and pulling out mysterious organs for classification. His aim: to present to the world a complete theory of 'das unheimliche', the uncanny. In the spirit of this great experiment, 14 leading authors have here been challenged to write fresh fictional interpretations of what the uncanny might mean in the 21st century, to update Freud's famous checklist of what gives us the creeps, and to give the hulking canon of uncanny fiction a shot in the arm, a shock to the neck-bolts...
£12.82
Comma Press The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction
Under the Israeli occupation of the '70s and '80s, writers in Gaza had to go to considerable lengths to ever have a chance of seeing their work in print. Manuscripts were written out longhand, invariably under pseudonyms, and smuggled out of the Strip to Jerusalem, Cairo or Beirut, where they then had to be typed up. Consequently, fiction grew shorter, novels became novellas, and short stories flourished as the city's form of choice. Indeed, to Palestinians elsewhere, Gaza became known as 'the exporter of oranges and short stories'. This anthology brings together some of the pioneers of the Gazan short story from that era, as well as younger exponents of the form, with ten stories that offer glimpses of life in the Strip that go beyond the global media headlines; stories of anxiety, oppression, and violence, but also of resilience and hope, of what it means to be a Palestinian, and how that identity is continually being reforged; stories of ordinary characters struggling to live with dignity in what many have called 'the largest prison in the world'.
£12.02
Comma Press The Book of Liverpool: A City in Short Fiction
Bringing together fiction from some of the city’s most celebrated writers, The Book of Liverpool traces the unique contours that decades of social and economic change can impress on a city. Set against key historical moments from the Second World War to the Capital of Culture year, these stories question what ‘belonging’ and ‘home’ mean in the Liverpudlian context, from the regenerated city centre to satellite suburbs, from the sparring cathedrals to the no-go concrete housing estates. Liverpool emerges in these short stories as a city in constant flux: haunted by ghosts, buoyed up by myths, and shifting with an ebb and flow like the Mersey itself.
£12.02
Comma Press Refugee Tales: Volume IV
Seventy years after the adoption of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UK is guilty of undermining the very principles of asylum, inhumanely detaining those seeking protection and ushering in sweeping changes that threaten to punish refugees at every turn. But the UK’s immigration system is not alone in committing such breaches of human rights. The fourth volume of Refugee Tales explores our present international environment, combining author re-tellings with first-hand accounts of individuals who have been detained across the world. As the coronavirus pandemic defies borders – leaving those who are detained even more vulnerable – this collection shares stories spanning Canada, Greece, Italy, Switzerland and the UK, and calls for international insistence on a future without detention. Featuring a prologue by Baroness Shami Chakrabarti. The fourth volume in the Refugee Tales series, proceeds from the sales of which go to two refugee charities.
£11.24
Comma Press Safely Gathered In
A woman grows increasingly annoyed by her husband's emails, offering advice and reminders even months after his death... A taxidermist dreams of preserving one of his clients after she takes him out for a coffee... A grieving nurse is troubled by her daughter's fascination with The Iron Lady... In Safely Gathered In, Sarah Schofield probes at the heart of what forms us and what we, in turn, form. The stories collected here expose the spaces that words often fail to reach and examine how objects - both manmade and natural - can reflect the darkest manifestations of grief and disconnection. From the child acting out a family betrayal in the comfort of her dolls house, to the sister making wind-up toys from the dead birds she finds on her doorstep, this debut collection ventures into the surreal and delivers a sense of unease that leaves us questioning why we gather the things we do. Sarah Schofield's narrators venture into spaces that language can't reach; we meet characters who create taxidermy pets to stave off loneliness or wind-up birds to deal with loss, and children processing family secrets through their dolls house or imitating Margaret Thatcher after the death of their father. Schofield also pushes the boundaries of literary fiction into science-fiction, with an architect preserving her bactogarden in a time of extreme climate crisis, and one man mistakenly creating an app to fix people's problems while they dream. In this powerful and touching debut collection, Schofield introduces a new and exciting voice to the canon of women's literary fiction.
£11.24
Comma Press The Cuckoo Cage: New Origin Stories
The superhero of comic books and blockbuster movies might be a State-side phenomenon, with its conservative notions of 'truth, justice and the American way'. But the cultural DNA of the superhero arguably lies in a much older, more progressive, British tradition: the folk heroes of British protest history. In this unique anthology, ten authors have been charged with resurrecting this tradition: to spawn a new generation of present-day British superheroes to bring the fight back to these shores, and to more progressive causes. From the statue-toppling Bristolian with otherworldly powers, to the Essex resident protecting public spaces and parks, these characters prove that it is possible to create a new breed of superhero in ways that capture essential truths about the society we live in.
£13.60
Comma Press Resist: Stories of Uprising
At a time that feels unprecedented in British politics - with unlawful prorogations of parliament, casual race-baiting by senior politicians, 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, just as it has witnessed regressive, heavy-handed governments. Much worse has been done, or allowed to be done, in the name of the people and eventually, those same people have called it out, stood up, and resisted. In this new collection of fictions and essays spanning two millennia of British protest, authors, historians, and activists re-imagine twenty acts of defiance: campaigns to change unjust laws, protests against unlawful acts, uprisings successful and unsuccessful - from Boudica to Blair Peach, from the Battle of Cable Street to the tragedy of Grenfell Tower. Britain might not be famous for its revolutionary spirit, but its people know when to draw the line, and say very clearly, '!No pasaran!'
£15.17
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!'
£15.17
Comma Press The Book of Barcelona: A City in Short Fiction
A slighted wife escapes her wealthy family for the evening and stumbles into the city's red-light district... The head of security at Barcelona's container port searches for a figure that only he has seen sneak in... An elderly woman brings home a machine that will turn her body into atoms, so she can leave behind a city that is no longer recognisable... Historically, Barcelona is a city of resistance and independence; a focal point for Catalan identity, as well as the capital of Spanish republicanism. Nestled between the Mediterranean coast and mountains, this burgeoning city has also been home to some of the greatest names in modern art and architecture, and attracts visitors and migrants from all over the world. As a result, the city is a melting-pot of cultures, and the stories gathered here offer a miscellany of form and genre, fittingly reminiscent of one of Gaudi's mosaics. From the boy-giant outgrowing his cramped flat on the city's outskirts, to the love affair that begins in a launderette, we meet characters who are reclaiming the independence of their city by challenging common misconceptions and telling its myriad truths.
£11.24
Comma Press The Ghost Who Bled
Spanning centuries and continents, the stories in this collection amount to a tour de force of literary worldbuilding. From deeply insecure time travellers to medieval mystics and futuristic body modification cults, Norminton’s characters find themselves torn between conflicting impulses – temptation and fortitude, hubris and shame, longing and regret. By turns sad, strange and darkly comic, The Ghost Who Bled reveals a master storyteller of incredible range.
£11.24
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.
£11.24
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'.
£11.24
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.
£11.24
Comma Press Phobic: Modern Horror Stories
Twenty emerging British authors are featured in this anthology of short stories that celebrates imagination and daring in writing. The themes of these works push the limit of the traditional short story form and simultaneously offer isolated moments of truth. Characters range from world-smashing behemoths to role-playing plush toys to a man forced to reckon with a mysterious briefcase. Offering a snapshot of the next generation of British literature, this collection will amuse and astound.
£11.24
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
£12.82
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.
£11.24
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.
£12.02
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.
£15.17
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.
£11.24
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.
£13.60
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.
£11.24
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."
£9.67
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.
£11.24
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.
£11.24
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.
£11.24
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.
£12.82
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.
£12.02
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.
£11.24
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Comma Press The BBC National Short Story Award 2023
£10.45
Comma Press True North: Selected Stories
£15.99
Comma Press Collision: Stories from the Science of CERN
As part of a unique collaboration, this book pairs a team of award-winning authors with CERN physicists to explore some of the consequences of what the LHC is learning, through fiction.
£12.02
Comma Press Ma is Scared
"Ma is Scared is the long-overdue debut of Anjali Kajal in English, representing the best of her short fiction, written and published over the last twenty years. From the anxious mother waiting for her daughter to return home safely, to the young student accused of stealing because of her caste, the stories gathered here explore the experience of women in small towns and urban centres across North India. Kajal writes about desire, abuse, silence, love and oppression in nuanced ways; how they are negotiated in the world; through relationships, family, motherhood, school, university, jobs. Her language, imagery and concerns are thoroughly contemporary, capturing the yearnings, restrictions and possibilities of modern life from a feminist and anti-caste perspective. "
£11.24
Comma Press All Walls Collapse: Stories of Separation
The history of walls – as a way to keep people in or out – is also the history of people managing to get around, over and under them. From the Berlin Wall and the Mexico–US border, to the barbed wire fences of Bangladesh’s refugee camps, the short stories in this anthology explore the barriers that have sought to divide communities and nations, and their traumatic effects on people’s lives and histories. At a time when more walls are being built than are being brought down, All Walls Collapse brings together writing from across national, ethnic and linguistic borders, challenging the political impulse to separate and segregate, and celebrating the role of literature in traversing division.
£13.60
Comma Press Kurdistan +100: Stories from a Future State
Kurdistan + 100 poses a question to twelve contemporary Kurdish writers: might the Kurds have a country to call their own by the year 2046 - exactly a century after the last glimmer of independence (the short-lived Kurdish Republic of Mahabad)? Or might the struggle for independence have taken new turns and new forms? Throughout the 20th century (and so far in the 21st), the Kurds have been betrayed, suppressed, stripped of their basic rights (from citizenship to the freedom to speak their own language) and had their political aspirations crushed at every turn. In this groundbreaking anthology, Kurdish authors (including several former political prisoners, and one currently serving a 183-year sentence for his views) imagine a freer future, one in which it is no longer effectively illegal to be a Kurd. From future eco-activism, to drone warfare, to the resuscitation of victims of past massacres, these stories explore different sides of the present struggle through the metaphor of futurism to dazzling effect. The first anthology of Kurdish science fiction ever collected and published in the UK, we have invited authors from all parts of 'Kurdistan' and the diaspora to write specially commissioned stories set in their own versions of the future.
£11.24
Comma Press The Book of Shanghai: A City in Short Fiction
The characters in this literary exploration of one of the world’s biggest cities are all on a mission. Whether it is responding to events around them, or following some impulse of their own, they are defined by their determination – a refusal to lose themselves in a city that might otherwise leave them anonymous, disconnected, alone. From the neglected mother whose side-hustle in collecting sellable waste becomes an obsession, to the schoolboy determined to end a long-standing feud between his family and another, the characters in The Book of Shanghai show a defiance that reminds us why Shanghai – despite its hurtling economic growth –remains an epicentre for individual creativity.
£11.24
Comma Press The BBC National Short Story Award 2018
Featuring the winning story by Ingrid Persaud, alongside the other four shortlisted stories. Hung-over and grief-stricken, a man contemplated suicide at the edge of a cliff, until he is unexpectedly distracted by the sight of a woman emerging from the water below... A group of art students protesting the demolition of a housing block decide to turn its destruction into a creative act... Waiting in her car for the rain to pass after her mother's funeral, a woman nurses her child and reflects on a world outside that remains headless of her sorrow... The stories shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University 2018 pivot around the theme of loss, and the different ways that individuals, and communities, respond to it. From the son caring for his estranged father, to the widow going out for her first meal alone, the characters in these stories are trying to find ways to repair themselves, looking ahead to a time when grief will eventually soften and sooth. Above all, these stories explore the importance of human connection, and salutary effect of companionship and friendship when all else seems lost.
£9.67
Comma Press The Book of Beijing
Bringing together fiction from celebrated writers, The Book of Beijing is an anthology of short stories charting the social and and cultural change of Beijing over the last fifty years, creating a literary map of the city.
£11.24