Comma: An Anthology - Softcover

Shelagh Delaney; Tony Wilson; Paul Morley; David Constantine; Michael Symmons Roberts; Emma Jane Unsworth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857546857 ISBN 13: 9781857546859

Publisher: Comma Press, 2002

Synopsis

A collection of specially commissioned, urban short stories edited by Ra Page to mark the launch of Comma Press. The city is at once strange and strangely familiar in these stories. Friendships break up or never quite begin across dark, decaying bars; lives are relived on home video, deaths pawed over in a crime photographer's fixing fluid. One woman's paranoia about being mugged or burgled leads to her questioning her own sanity; another, driving home late one night, wonders how the events in her life have led inexorably to this moment. A woman dozing in her bathtub feels the wooden keel of a boat slowly sprouting from her head; a man on his way to a job interview suddenly realises he hasn't passed water for four days. Real or surreal, despairing or defiant, these stories prove that far from being a genre of offcuts and unfinished ideas, the short story, if only we give it a moment, is very much alive and well.

About this title

About the Author

Shelagh Delaney wrote A Taste of Honey (1960) at the age of 17, and a year later The Lion in Love. She has since published a collection of short stories, Sweetly Sings the Donkey, and has written widely for TV, radio and cinema. Her screenplays include The White Bus (1966), Charlie Bubbles (1968) and Dance With a Stranger (1985). Paul Morley has been a writer and columnist for the NME, The Face, Blitz, The New Statesman, The Guardian and Esquire. He was an original presenter of BBC2's The Late Show and a founding member of the group Art of Noise. His first book, Nothing, was published by Faber in 2000. Tony Wilson's first piece of fiction, The Lightweight Trigger was published anonymously in The City Life Book of Manchester Short Stories (Penguin, 1999). He has since written a novelisation of Michael Winterbottom s film Twenty-Four Hour Party People (2002). David Constantine has published several volumes of poetry, most recently, Nine Fathom Deep (2009). He is an award-winning translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. He is also author of one novel, Davies, and Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton. His three previous short story collections are Back at the Spike, the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (Comma, 2005), and The Shieling (Comma, 2009), which was shortlisted for the 2010 Frank O Connor International Short Story Award. Constantine s story Tea at the Midland won the BBC National Short Story Award 2010.

Synopsis

To herald the new fiction imprint, Comma, the critic and editor Ra Page specially commissioned short stories by 15 contemporary writers - each with their own distinctive take on the short form.

About this edition

• Publisher: Comma Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1857546857
• ISBN 13: 9781857546859
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 220
• Editor: Ra Page