Instruction Manual for Swallowing. This item is unavailable.Instruction Manual for Swallowing

Robotic insects, in-growing cutlery, flesh-serving waiters in a zombie cafe...

Welcome to the surreal, misshapen universe of Adam Marek's first collection; a bestiary of hybrids from the techno-crazed future and mythical past; a users guide to the seemingly obvious (and the world of illogic implicit within it). Whether fantastical or everyday in setting, Marek's stories lead us down to the engine room just beneath modern consciousness, a place of both atavism and familiarity, where the body is fluid, the spirit mechanised, and beasts often tell us more about our humanity than anything we can teach ourselves.

***WINNER of the 2011 Arts Foundation Fellowship in Short Story Writing*** **Short-Listed for the 2010 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award** *Long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize* Adam Marek was born in 1974. His stories have appeared in Prospect magazine, New Writing 15 edited by Maggie Gee and Bernardine Evaristo, The Bridport Prize Anthology (2003 and 2005), Parenthesis, The New Uncanny, When It Changed edited by Geoff Ryman, and on-line at Pulp.net. In 2007, his story 'Testicular Cancer vs the Behemoth' was performed by Ian Hart (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Dirt) at the WordTheatre event in London. His first full collection, Instruction Manual for Swallowing was published by Comma Press in 2007. He has since contributed short stories to Comma's anthologies The New Uncanny (2008) and When It Changed (2009) and has published a second short story collection, The Stone Thrower. He lives in Bedfordshire with his wife and sons.