Bøger udgivet af 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.