Böcker utgivna av Comma Press

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

In January 2017, President Trump signed an executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries - Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen - from entering the United States, effectively slamming the door on refugees seeking safety and tearing families apart. Mass protests followed, and although the order has since been blocked, amended and challenged by judges, it still stands as one of the most discriminatory laws to be passed in the US in modern times. Banthology brings together specially commissioned stories from the original seven 'banned nations'. Covering a range of approaches - from satire, to allegory, to literary realism - it explores the emotional and personal impact of all restrictions on movement, and offers a platform to voices the White House would rather remained silent.

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.

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.

In this powerful, debut collection, Rania Mamoun expertly blends the real and imagined to create a rich, complex and moving portrait of contemporary Sudan. From painful encounters with loved ones to unexpected new friendships, Mamoun illuminates the breadth of human experience and explores, with humour and compassion, the alienation, isolation and estrangement that is urban life. Translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette.

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.

A police officer tortures one last suspect in the most important assignment of his career: to find the ultimate Truth... A woman confesses her love to a reclusive, masked man in a video rental shop... A disgraced doctor confronts a man whose job it is to create rumours that spread across Cairo... Founded over a thousand years ago under the sign of Mars "e;the victorious"e;, Cairo has long been a welcoming destination for explorers and tourists, drawn by traces of the ancient cities of Memphis and Heliopolis. More recently, the Egyptian capital has become a city determined to forget. Since 2013, the events of the Arab Spring have been gradually erased from its official history. The present is now contested as writers are imprisoned, publishing houses raided, and independent news sites shut down. With a new Administrative Capital being built in the desert east of Cairo, the city s future is also unclear. Here ten new voices offer tentative glimpses into Cairene life, at a time when writing directly about Egypt s greatest challenges is often too dangerous. With intimate views of life, tinged with satire, surrealism, and humour, these stories guide us through the slums and suburbs, bars and backstreets of a city haunted by an unspoken past.

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.

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.

The Sea Cloak is a collection of 11 stories by the author, journalist, and women's rights 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.