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 experiences anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims stories in Chaucers Canterbury Tales, this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering.
Throughout his career, M. John Harrison's writing has defied categorisation, building worlds both unreal and all-too real, overlapping and interlocking with each other. His stories are replete with fissures and portals into parallel dimensions, unidentified countries and lost lands. But more important than the places they point to are the obsessions that drive the people who so believe in them, characters who spend their lives hunting for, and haunted by, clues and maps that speak to the possibility of somewhere else. This selection of stories, drawn from over 50 years of writing, bears witness to that desire for difference: whether following backstreet occultists, amateur philosophers, down-and-outs or refugees, we see our relationship with 'the other' in microscopic detail, and share in Harrison's rejection of the idea that the world, or our understanding of it, could ever be settled.
From the neglected mother whose side-hustle becomes an obsession, to the schoolboy determined to end a long-standing feud, 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.
Includes stories by 21 of the world's leading crime writers on the theme of identity: identity theft, identity twists, whodunits that turn on the question of 'who indeed'. This work features Grand Masters, Diamond, Silver and Gold Dagger winning writers.
Modelled on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Refugee Tales series sets out to communicate the experiences of those who, having sought asylum in the UK, find themselves indefinitely detained. Here, poets, novelists and other established writers 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... Featuring specially written stories (based on real-life testimonies) by David Mitchell, Daljit Nagra, Guy Gunaratne, Tess McWatt, Natasha Brown, Guy Gunaratne, David Flusfeder, Haifa Zangana and others.
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.
Featuring ten short stories by ten Manchester authors that capture the social, historical and political essence of this major city.
Plant-based skyscrapers, reluctant sex robots, pencil-wielding black-belts fighting a zombie apocalypse... Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Adam Marek's third collection: an almanac of the absurd, a handbook to the hardware problems of being human. From driverless bodies, to life-coaching AIs, to sleep research on primates, to the effects of time dilation on married life... these stories explore the unlikeliest of possibilities the future may hold for us, as a race, but at their heart is a paradox: what happens when the seemingly limitless potential of human ability runs up against the insurmountable inadequacies of basic human psychology? Sons never forgive their fathers. Superheroes are brought low by simple performance anxiety. Billionaire space industrialists are exposed by their bad parenting skills. Hardwired into our humanity, it seems, are bugs that no amount of future upgrades can ever fix.
Princesses who never wanted to be rescued... debutantes who are unwilling to keep quiet about politics just to preserve their marriage prospects... fairy tale characters who question key motivations in their own, now-famous stories... The protagonists of Sara Maitland's remarkable short fiction all seem to be bursting at the seams of their own characterisation, challenging our understanding of age-old narratives, and showing even the fundamentals of storytelling to be fluid, malleable and unreliable. Spanning over 40 years of writing, Sara Maitland's Selected Stories brings together highlights from a phenomenal career in short fiction. Traditional folk stories, myths and fairy tales are expertly interrogated, modernised and given feminist and scientific re-readings. Drawing from classical, Norse, Inuit and other pagan mythologies, these stories find folkloric archetypes alive and well in every conceivable modern context. Formally innovative, emotionally edgy and deeply imbued with a sense of landscape, they speak to our abiding concerns about humanity's relationship with the natural world, and the past's uncanny ability to creep into our present and re-shape it, according to its o
Egypt + 100 poses a question to twelve contemporary Egyptian authors: what might your country look like in the year 2111 - exactly a century after the failed Tahrir Square Revolution? Might Egypt still be in the grip of ' friendly authoritarianism', clinging to power with all the weapons of futurism at its disposal: protest-avoidant architecture, excessive surveillance, the slow replacement of the outside world with the virtual one. Or might other historical forces come into play, pairing pragmatism with tolerance, and realising some of the lost aspirations of the long-cancelled ' Arab Spring' . Covering a range of styles - from SF noir, to supernatural horror, to political farce - these stories use the blank canvas of the future to process recent traumas that Egypt has yet to come to terms with. Along the way, we encounter gladiatorial entertainments, anti-procreation resistance movements, the decline of Cairo into a lawless wasteland, far from the gated security of the New Capital, and the simultaneous flooding of lower Egypt with the drying up of the Nile. Each story offers an object lesson in the strange logic of authoritarianism, and how, as the editor puts it, politicians' fant
An ex-con on compassionate release revisits his old haunts, only to feel dispossessed by how much the city has changed... The son of political dissidents in Soviet-era Prague is condemned to a life of menial jobs, like working at a local abattoir, unable to imagine his prospects ever improving... A young shop assistant in a tourist-friendly antique shop imagines what Prague would now look like if Czechoslovakia had stood up to the Nazis... The stories collected in this anthology show Prague to be a city of myriad layers and multiple histories. Famous for its untouched, Gothic and Baroque architecture and its trapped-in-aspic charm, it is also a place that has lived through numerous traumas over the last century and learned to conceal its scars, perhaps a little too well. Just as its landmarks should be preserved, so should these hidden histories, and sometimes the best place to preserve them is in stories. Translated by Alz beta Belá nová, Geoffrey Chew, Melvyn Clarke, Graeme Dibble, Paul Kaye, Andrew Oakland, Justin Quinn, Julia and Peter Sherwood, Paul Wilson and Alex Zucker. Supported by the Czech Literary Centre and the Moravian Library.
A teenager discovers her father only brought her from Pakistan to England because he was being haunted by the spirit of her late mother... A divorcee blunders into his ex-wife's garden with one goal in mind: to beat his personal best for holding his breath underwater in her pool... A waitress finds herself serving an old school friend who once had a great impact on her but now doesn't recognise her... The stories shortlisted for the 2023 BBC National Short Story Award reveal characters unmoored from their pasts and quite unable to find themselves in their new lives. Displacement, dislocation and a need to rekindle old identities lie at the heart of these tales: from the woman trying to bond with a refugee and her young son, to the mother struggling simultaneously with the traditional expectations of her Chinese in-laws and the dangers of online life, these stories are freighted with disconnection but buoyed with a desire to start afresh.
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.
Taking its title from the savvy, street-wise slave girl in A Thousand And One Nights, this debut collection from Mosul-born Anoud, celebrates the strongest of women in the toughest of predicaments. From the heroine of the title story, fighting her way out of forced marriage to the leader of an ISIS-style jihadi army, to the schoolgirl learning how to pick her way through potential car-bombs on her way to school in war-torn Baghdad, to the destitute refugee found in a London cafe raving at a TV screen broadcasting news of Trump's travel ban; these stories run the gamut on the myriad ways war impacts on the lives and freedoms of women. Anoud is a pseudonym, originally adopted out of concern for her relatives' safety back home in Mosul during the period it was held by ISIS, which the author has now kept. She is a journalist and documentary researcher, having worked and written for the BBC and The Guardian. She grew up between Mosul, Baghdad and Ireland, and currently lives in New York (spending some of the year in Algiers).
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.
"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. "
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.
The latest edition to Comma's popular Reading the City series. Ten short stories by ten Bristolian writers.
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.
All Walls Collapse brings together 12 acclaimed writers from across the world to explore the impact of walls, barriers, partitions and borders on people's lives, as well as their communities.
Described as one of the as one of the UK's finest short story writers, Constantine intricately interweaves fictional characters and events with the real to create new ways of seeing and connecting our past, present and possible futures.
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