comma press gb (308 results)

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. 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. UK ed.

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. 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.

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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.

Paperback. Condition: New. Two music producers pack up their studio - along with their dreams of ever making it in the industry - after too many bands fail to pay their bills.A woman takes up an invitation to visit an ex-lover in Arizona, only to find his apartment is no bigger than a motel room.A former drama student runs into an old classmate from ten years before, hardly recognising the timid creature he's become.Each character in Larissa Boehning's debut collection experiences a moment where they're forced to confront how differently things turned out, how quickly ambitions were shelved, or how easily people change. Former colleagues meet up to reminisce about the failed agency they used to work for; brothers-in-law find themselves co-habiting long after the one person they had in common passed away; fellow performers watch as their careers slowly drift in opposite directions. Boehning's stories offer a rich store of metaphors for this abandonment: the downed tools of a deserted East German factory, lying exactly where they were dropped the day Communism fell; the old, collected cameras of a late father that seem to stare, wide-eyed, at the world he left behind. And yet, underpinning this abandonment, there is also great resilience. Like the cat spotted by a demolition worker in the penultimate story that sits, unflinching, as its home is bulldozed around it, certain spirits abide.

Paperback. Condition: New. 'Recently something funny happened. There was no summer, no autumn either.' With this opener Maike Wetzel begins exploring that moment in life when the breakneck experience of growing up suddenly changes gear and slows down. A young woman sees a dead body for the first time; a sister watches her anorexic sibling transform into different person; a girl pieces together the facts of a custody battle she's not been let in on. Wetzel's stories catch people when some part of their lives has been put on pause, leaving them so adrift only acts of obsession or self-destruction provide direction. Wetzel's stories have great depth of focus. In the background, an over-eager teacher might be explaining the facts of life in unnecessary, lurid detail, but in the foreground students will be taking drastic measures, in secret; a gymnastics class may be limbering up for an impressive display, but in close-up, dietcrazed girls faint in alarming numbers. With pared down but insistent language, Wetzel achieves a poise and clarity and presents lives that are as arresting as they are arrested.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.