Bøger udgivet af Comma Press

Identity, in Guy Ware's confident debut collection, is a mercurial thing. Lawyers paint conflicting pictures of an alleged terrorist; a city trader decides, without warning, to walk out of her life; flirting lovers take role-play to a new, existential, level. Whether living under a totalitarian regime or simply getting through the day in a grindingly predictable metropolis, Ware's characters struggle with the urge to redefine themselves, to start again, to reboot.

From human trafficking in the forests of Serbia, to the nightmares of an exile trying to embrace a new life in Amsterdam, Blasim's stories present an uncompromising view of the West's relationship with Iraq, taking in everything from the Iran-Iraq War through to the Occupation, offering a haunting critique of the post-war refugee experience.

The characters in David Constantine's collection are united by an urge to absent themselves, to abscond from the intolerable pressures of normal life and withdraw into strange ideas, political causes and private languages. Such is the force of Constantine's compassion, however, we cannot help but follow each character into their isolation.

"Corrosively funny, wistful, sharp, strange and black as a coffin lid, Rob Shearman's collection is an addictive delight. The stories stay with you with the persistence of a witch's familiar entwining its tail around your throat." --Mark Gatiss, writer and actor, "The League of Gentlemen"

Picking up the primary scent of any investigation, this anthology of wicked tales paints a chilling portrait of modus operandi--the signature that identifies any repeat offender. In this collection of villainous narratives, a coroner reveals a body's telltale clues to his students as he unwittingly dissects his own relationship, a broken-down driver turns his roadside routine into a quite different type of pick-up, and two creative-writing tutors discuss the merits of "hard-boiled" versus "cozy" schools of crime writing while a murderous student points out that it's really procedure that counts. From the ex-doctor tenderly administering a final prescription to his victims to the party of finishing school debutantes exacting revenge on their lecherous host, these stories demonstrate that, even with the most despicable of crimes, there is always methodology within the madness.

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.

The stories of David Constantine are unlike any others. His characters possess you instantly, making you see the world as they do- sometimes as exiles, driven into isolation by convictions that even they don t fully understand; sometimes as carriers of an unspoken but unbearable weight. The things they pursue, or evade, are often unseen and at a distance- like the perfectly preserved body of a woman in the title story, waiting to be discovered in the receding ice of a Swiss glacier. These tokens of the past, or future, haunt Constantine's characters, but the landscapes that produce them also offer salvation, places of refuge or small treasures to take solace in- like the piece of driftwood a beachcomber chooses to carve into his idea of perfection. Gathering together stories from over two decades of writing, this selection demonstrates why Constantine has been hailed as perhaps the finest of contemporary writers in this form. Their bewitching and urgent language is at one and the same time unsettling and strong enough to help. Featuring the story, 'In Another Country', that inspired the motion picture, 45 Years. Also featuring selected stories from David Constantine's Comma Press back catalogue : Under The Dam (2005); The Shieling (2009); Tea at the Midland (2012).

Following the death of her husband, a literary biographer resolves to turn her professional skills to the task of piecing together aspects of his life, in particular, a journey he made years before they met. David Constantine's passionate tale of grief marks only the second novel for an author whose short fiction has won international acclaim.

A young woman sees a dead body for the first time; a sister watches her anorexic sibling transform into a different person; a girl pieces together the facts of a custody battle. 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.

In the middle of a speech a businessman realises his soul has just left his body. In an Athens marketplace, a jealous lover finds himself staggering through a vision of hell. High in the Alps, a young woman's body re-appears in the glacier, perfectly preserved, where she fell 50 years before. Entering Constantine's stories is like stepping out into a wind of words, a swarm of language. His prose is as fluid as the water that surges and swells through all his landscapes. Yet, against this fluidity, his stories are able to stop time, to freeze-frame each protagonist's life just at the moment when the past breaks the surface, or when the present - like the dam of the title - collapses under its own weight. Features 'In Another Country' - recently been adapted for the big screen '45 Years' starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay.