Böcker utgivna av Comma Press

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.

Bringing together fiction from celebrated writers, The Book of Barcelona is an anthology of short stories charting the social and and cultural change of Barcelona over the last fifty years, creating a literary map of the city.

The stories shortlisted for the 2021 BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University take place in liminal spaces - their characters find themselves in transit, travelling along flight paths, train lines and roads, or in moments where new opportunities or directions suddenly seem possible.

The third instalment of Comma's popular series showcasing science fiction stories from the Middle East, this time asking the authors to write stories set 100 years after the Mahabad, home of the short-lived Republic.

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.

Iceland is a land of stories; from the epic sagas of its mythic past, to its claim today of being home to more writers than anywhere in the world. Reykjavik, a fishing-village-turned-metropolis, has been both revered and reviled by Icelanders, with tension rising between the city and the surrounding countryside, its rural past and urban present.

Ramallah, the de facto capital of the West Bank, hemmed in and suffocated by the Occupation as the Oslo Peace Accords have failed. The stories collected here showcase the resilience and humour of its people, who continue to live through countless sieges, and yet still find the time, and resourcefulness, to create.

In this unique anthology, British authors have been charged with resurrecting the folk heroes of British protest history.

Bringing together fiction from celebrated writers, The Book of Venice is an anthology of short stories charting the social and and cultural change of Venice over the last fifty years, creating a literary map of the city.

Traversing the different neighbourhoods and districts, the stories gathered here attempt to capture the essence of contemporary Jakarta and its writing, as well as the ever-changing landscape of the fastest-sinking city in the world.

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.

Bringing together 28 acclaimed women writers, artists, scientists and entrepeneurs from across Europe, this powerful and timely anthology looks at an ever-changing Europe from a variety of different perspectives and offers hope and insight into how we might begin to rebuild.

The Book of Newcastle brings together some of the city's most renowned literary talents, along with exciting new voices, proving that while Newcastle continues to feel the effects of its lost industrial past, it is also a city striving for a future that brims with promise.

In this timely collection of fiction and essays celebrating key moments of British protest, writers fight back with well-researched, historically accurate fiction.

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.

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.

Bringing together new short stories by ten of the city's most celebrated writers. From young creatives and refugees, to 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'.

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.

Fourteen 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...

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.

Whatever happened to British protest? For a nation that brought the world Chartism, the Suffragettes, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and so many other grassroots social movements, Britain rarely celebrates its long, great tradition of people power. In this timely and evocative collection, twenty authors have assembled to re-imagine key moments of British protest, from the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 to the anti-Iraq War demo of 2003. Written in close consultation with historians, sociologists and eyewitnesses - who also contribute afterwords - these stories follow fictional characters caught up in real-life struggles, offering a streetlevel perspective on the noble art of resistance. n the age of fake news and post-truth politics this book fights fiction with (well researched, historically accurate) fiction.

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.

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.

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. Featuring an all-female shortlist of fantastic writers, the winner will be announced 4th October.

Before his untimely death at the age of 47, Dinesh Allirajah was one of the most versatile and accomplished writers working in the North of England. Whether as a performance poet, literary critic, wry social commentator or masterfully understated short story writer, his work was always international in scope, but local and personal in touch. Witty, irreverent, and intricately observed, his writing was informed by everything from raregroove jazz to experimental theatre, crime noir to stand-up comedy. Yet it always felt, and continues to feel, bespoke to us as readers. The short stories, in particular, allow us to eavesdrop on the most intimate, unattended moments in their characters lives. Here, we get to know outsiders migrant workers, beleaguered mothers, old and unwanted regulars in a pub that's facing a refurb people being slowly ushered into the background, or kept at a distance. Yet it is on these peripheries far from where everyone else is looking that Dinesh finds his stories, here that identities are reconstructed and renegotiated, here that we learn the most about ourselves. Spanning over twenty years work, this definitive volume presents a through-line of Dinesh's compassion, activism, and literary perspicacity; a clarion call to find essential beauty - in art, music, sport, life - and to pass it on.

The stories gathered in this anthology reflect the many complex challenges Havana's citizens have had to endure as a result of their country s political isolation from the hardships of the 'Special Period', to the pitfalls of Cuba s schizophrenic currency system, to the indignities of becoming a cheap tourist destination for well-heeled Westerners. Moving through various moments in its recent history, as well as through different neighbourhoods from the prefab, Soviet-era maze of Alamar, to the bars and nightclubs of the Malecon and Vedado these stories also demonstrate the defiance of Havana: surviving decades of economic disappointment with a flair for the comic, the surreal and the fantastical that remains as fresh as the first dreams of revolution.