comma press gb (320 results)

Paperback. Condition: New. A group of teenage boys take turns assessing each other's changing bodies before a Friday night disco. A grieving woman strikes up an unlikely friendship with a fellow traveller on a night train to Kiev. An unusually well-informed naturalist is eyed with suspicion by his comrades on a forest exhibition with a higher purpose. 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. From the reflections of a new mother flying home after a funeral, to an ailing son's reluctance to return to the village of his childhood, these stories celebrate small kindnesses in times of turbulence, and demonstrate a connection between one another that we might sometimes take for granted. The BBC NSSA is one of the most prestigious prizes for a single short story, with the winning author receiving £15,000, and four further shortlisted authors £600 each. James Runcie is joined on the judging panel by a group of acclaimed writers and critics including: Booker Prize shortlisted novelist Fiona Mozley; award winning writer, poet and winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize, Derek Owusu; multi-award winning Irish novelist and short story writer, Donal Ryan; and returning judge, Di Speirs, Books Editor at BBC Radio.

Paperback. Condition: New.

Paperback. Condition: New. A group of teenage boys take turns assessing each other's changing bodies before a Friday night disco. A grieving woman strikes up an unlikely friendship with a fellow traveller on a night train to Kiev. An unusually well-informed naturalist is eyed with suspicion by his comrades on a forest exhibition with a higher purpose. 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. From the reflections of a new mother flying home after a funeral, to an ailing son's reluctance to return to the village of his childhood, these stories celebrate small kindnesses in times of turbulence, and demonstrate a connection between one another that we might sometimes take for granted. The BBC NSSA is one of the most prestigious prizes for a single short story, with the winning author receiving £15,000, and four further shortlisted authors £600 each. James Runcie is joined on the judging panel by a group of acclaimed writers and critics including: Booker Prize shortlisted novelist Fiona Mozley; award winning writer, poet and winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize, Derek Owusu; multi-award winning Irish novelist and short story writer, Donal Ryan; and returning judge, Di Speirs, Books Editor at BBC Radio.

Paperback. Condition: New.

Paperback. Condition: New.

Paperback. Condition: New. The twelfth year of the incredibly successful anthology of the BBC National Short Story Award shortlist. This year, no.1 bestselling author Joanna Trollope will be chairing the judging panel, taking the mantle from Radio 4's 'Women's Hour' presenter Jenny Murray. Trollope, known as one of the most insightful chroniclers and social commentators writing today is also a long-time short story writer. Trollope is joined by an esteemed panel of award-winning writers and literary specialists: Baileys Prize winner, Eimear McBride (Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction), Jon McGregor (IMPAC Award, short story writer and academic), Sunjeev Sahota (Encore Award winner), and returning judge Di Speirs, Books Editor at BBC Radio. All the judges are eager to read the best, and most innovative, works of short fiction from new and established writers. Last year's winner was K J Orr with her story 'Disappearances'. As always, this book will be strictly embargoed until the announcement of the shortlist on Radio 4's Front Row at 7:15pm on Friday 15th September. The shortlisted stories will be broadcast between Monday 18th - Friday 22nd September accompanied by interviews with the authors from the 15th September. The winner will be announced in a live broadcast from the Award ceremony on BBC Radio 4's Front Row from 7.15pm on Tuesday 3 October 2017. Previous shortlisted authors include Hilary Mantel, David Constantine, Lionel Shriver and Zadie Smith.

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Paperback. Condition: New. An inspector rages against the announcement that police HQ is to relocate - the way so many of the city's residents already have - to the mainland. An aspiring author struggles with the inexorable creep of rentalisation that has forced him to share his apartment, and life, with 'global pilgrims'. An ageing painter rails against the liberties taken by tourists, but finds his anger undermined by his own childhood memories of the place. The Venice presented in these stories is a far cry from the 'impossibly beautiful', frozen-in-time city so familiar to the thousands who flock there every year - a city about which, Henry James once wrote, 'there is nothing new to be said.' Instead, they represent the other Venice, the one tourists rarely see: the real, everyday city that Venetians have to live and work in. Rather than a city in stasis, we see it at a crossroads, fighting to regain its radical, working-class soul, regretting the policies that have seen it turn slowly into a theme park, and taking the pandemic as an opportunity to rethink what kind of city it wants to be.

Paperback. Condition: New. Upon changing his religion, a young man is denounced as an apostate and flees his country hiding in the back of a freezer lorry.After years of travelling and losing almost everything - his country, his children, his wife, his farm - an Afghan man finds unexpected warmth and comfort in a stranger's home.A student protester is forced to leave his homeland after a government crackdown, and spends the next 25 years in limbo, trapped in the UK asylum system.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.

Paperback. Condition: New. 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.

Paperback. Condition: New. In the 26 years since Georgia declared independence from the Soviet Union, the country and its capital, Tbilisi, have endured unimaginable hardships: one coup d'état, two wars with Russia, the cancer of organised crime, and prolonged periods of brutalising, economic depression. Now, as the city begins to flourish again - drawing hordes of tourists with its eclectic architecture and famous, welcoming spirit - it's difficult to reconcile the recent past with this glamorous and exotic present. With wit, warmth, heartbreaking realism, and a distinctly Georgian sense of neighbourliness, these ten stories do just that.

Paperback. Condition: New. 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 the coronavirus pandemic defies borders - leaving those who are detained even more vulnerable - this collection shares stories spanning Canada, Greece, Italy, Switzerland and the UK, and calls for international insistence on a future without detention.Featuring a prologue by Baroness Shami Chakrabarti. The fourth volume in the Refugee Tales series, proceeds from the sales of which go to two refugee charities.

Paperback. Condition: New. Dhaka may be one of the most densely populated cities in the world - noisy, grid-locked, short on public amenities, and blighted with sprawling slums - but, as these stories show, it is also one of the most colourful and chaotically joyful places you could possibly call home. Slum kids and film stars, day-dreaming rich boys, gangsters and former freedom fighters all rub shoulders in these streets, often with Dhaka's famous rickshaws ferrying them to and fro across cultural, economic and ethnic divides. Just like Dhaka itself, these stories thrive on the rich interplay between folk culture and high art; they both cherish and lampoon the city's great tradition of political protest, and they pay tribute to a nation that was borne out of a love of language, one language in particular, Bangla (from which all these stories have been translated).

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Paperback. Condition: New. What makes for a good short story? Being short, you might think the storys structure would yield an answer to this question more readily than, say, the novel. But for as long as the short story has been around, arguments have raged as to what it should and shouldnt be made up of, what it should and shouldnt do. Here,15 leading contemporary practitioners offer structural appreciations of past masters of the form as well as their own perspectives on what the short story does so well. The best short stories dont have closure, argues one contributor, because life doesnt have closure; plot must be written with the denouement constantly in view, quotes another. Covering a century of writing that arguably saw all the major short forms emerge, from Hawthornes Twice Told Tales to Kafkas modernist nightmares, these essays offer new and unique inroads into classic texts, both for the literature student and aspiring writer.

Paperback. Condition: New. Upon changing his religion, a young man is denounced as an apostate and flees his country hiding in the back of a freezer lorry.After years of travelling and losing almost everything - his country, his children, his wife, his farm - an Afghan man finds unexpected warmth and comfort in a stranger's home.A student protester is forced to leave his homeland after a government crackdown, and spends the next 25 years in limbo, trapped in the UK asylum system.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.

Paperback. Condition: New. Made up of over 17,000 islands, Indonesia is the fourth most populous country on the planet. It is home to hundreds of different ethnicities and languages, and a cultural identity that is therefore constantly in flux. Like the country as a whole, the capital Jakarta is a multiplicity of irreducible, unpredictable and contradictory perspectives. From down-and-out philosophers to roadside entertainers, the characters in these stories see Jakarta from all angles. Traversing different neighbourhoods and social strata, their stories capture the energy, aspirations, and ever-changing landscape of what is also the world's fastest-sinking city. Translated by Mikael Johani, Zoe McLaughlin, Shaffira Gayatri, Khairani Barokka, Daniel Owen, Paul Agusta, Eliza Vitri Handayani, Syarafina Vidyadhana, Rara Rizal and Annie Tucker. This book has been published with the support of the British Council.

Paperback. Condition: New. An inspector rages against the announcement that police HQ is to relocate - the way so many of the city's residents already have - to the mainland. An aspiring author struggles with the inexorable creep of rentalisation that has forced him to share his apartment, and life, with 'global pilgrims'. An ageing painter rails against the liberties taken by tourists, but finds his anger undermined by his own childhood memories of the place. The Venice presented in these stories is a far cry from the 'impossibly beautiful', frozen-in-time city so familiar to the thousands who flock there every year - a city about which, Henry James once wrote, 'there is nothing new to be said.' Instead, they represent the other Venice, the one tourists rarely see: the real, everyday city that Venetians have to live and work in. Rather than a city in stasis, we see it at a crossroads, fighting to regain its radical, working-class soul, regretting the policies that have seen it turn slowly into a theme park, and taking the pandemic as an opportunity to rethink what kind of city it wants to be.

Paperback. Condition: New. 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.

Paperback. Condition: New. Described as one of the as one of the UK's finest short story writers, Constantine intricately interweaves fictional characters and events with the real to create new ways of seeing and connecting our past, present and possible futures.With extraordinary patience and precision, these stories centre on moments, conversations, meetings that feel like small details picked out from a larger tapestry. From the academic in Paris, researching and processing the atrocities of the 1871 Paris Commune, to the young biographer who tries to befriend the ailing poet Hoelderlin, the characters in this collection are united by an urge for connection, a desire to better know themselves - and the world around them - to counteract a loss of hope and belonging.

Paperback. Condition: New. Unlike most other Palestinian cities, Ramallah is a relatively new town, a de facto capital of the West Bank allowed to thrive after the Oslo Peace Accords, but just as quickly hemmed in and suffocated by the Occupation as the Accords have failed. Perched along the top of a mountainous ridge, it plays host to many contradictions: traditional Palestinian architecture jostling against aspirational developments and cultural initiatives, a thriving nightlife in one district, with much more conservative, religious attitudes in the next. Most striking however - as these stories show - is the quiet dignity, resilience and humour of its people; citizens who take their lives into their hands every time they travel from one place to the next, who continue to live through countless sieges, and yet still find the time, and resourcefulness, to create. Translated by Basma Ghalayini, Alexander Hong, Thoraya El-Rayyes, Mohammed Ghalaieny, Raph Cormack, Adam Talib, Yasmine Seale, Andrew Leber, Emre Bennett and Raph Cohen.

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Paperback. Condition: New.

Paperback. Condition: New. Twenty emerging British authors are featured in this anthology of short stories that celebrates imagination and daring in writing. The themes of these works push the limit of the traditional short story form and simultaneously offer isolated moments of truth. Characters range from world-smashing behemoths to role-playing plush toys to a man forced to reckon with a mysterious briefcase. Offering a snapshot of the next generation of British literature, this collection will amuse and astound.

Paperback. Condition: New. Dhaka may be one of the most densely populated cities in the world - noisy, grid-locked, short on public amenities, and blighted with sprawling slums - but, as these stories show, it is also one of the most colourful and chaotically joyful places you could possibly call home. Slum kids and film stars, day-dreaming rich boys, gangsters and former freedom fighters all rub shoulders in these streets, often with Dhaka's famous rickshaws ferrying them to and fro across cultural, economic and ethnic divides. Just like Dhaka itself, these stories thrive on the rich interplay between folk culture and high art; they both cherish and lampoon the city's great tradition of political protest, and they pay tribute to a nation that was borne out of a love of language, one language in particular, Bangla (from which all these stories have been translated).

Paperback. Condition: New. "Ma is Scared is the long-overdue debut of Anjali Kajal in English, representing the best of her short fiction, written and published over the last twenty years.From the anxious mother waiting for her daughter to return home safely, to the young student accused of stealing because of her caste, the stories gathered here explore the experience of women in small towns and urban centres across North India. Kajal writes about desire, abuse, silence, love and oppression in nuanced ways; how they are negotiated in the world; through relationships, family, motherhood, school, university, jobs. Her language, imagery and concerns are thoroughly contemporary, capturing the yearnings, restrictions and possibilities of modern life from a feminist and anti-caste perspective. ".

Paperback. Condition: New. "Ma is Scared is the long-overdue debut of Anjali Kajal in English, representing the best of her short fiction, written and published over the last twenty years.From the anxious mother waiting for her daughter to return home safely, to the young student accused of stealing because of her caste, the stories gathered here explore the experience of women in small towns and urban centres across North India. Kajal writes about desire, abuse, silence, love and oppression in nuanced ways; how they are negotiated in the world; through relationships, family, motherhood, school, university, jobs. Her language, imagery and concerns are thoroughly contemporary, capturing the yearnings, restrictions and possibilities of modern life from a feminist and anti-caste perspective. ".

Paperback. Condition: New. Spanning centuries and continents, the stories in this collection amount to a tour de force of literary worldbuilding. From deeply insecure time travellers to medieval mystics and futuristic body modification cults, Norminton's characters find themselves torn between conflicting impulses - temptation and fortitude, hubris and shame, longing and regret. By turns sad, strange and darkly comic, The Ghost Who Bled reveals a master storyteller of incredible range.