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Instruction Manual for Swallowing
***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* 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.
The Stone Thrower
Intelligent clothing, superhero dictators, contagion-carrying computer games, cross-species reproduction... Welcome to the strange and startling world of Adam Marek; a menagerie of futuristic technology, sinister traditions and scientifically-grounded superpowers a place where the absurd and the mundane are not merely bedfellows, but interbreed. Pulsing at the core of Adam Marek's much-anticipated second collection is a single, unifying theme: a parent s instinct to protect a particularly vulnerable child. Whether set amid unnerving visions of the near-future, or grounded in the domestic here-and-now, these stories demonstrate that, sometimes, only outright surrealism can do justice to the merciless strangeness of reality, only the fantastically illogical can steel us against what ordinary life threatens.
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story: 1
TELEGRAPH, INDEPENDENT, FINANCIAL TIMES AND OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015 Hilarious, exuberant, subtle, tender, brutal, spectacular, and above all unexpected: these two extraordinary volumes contain the limitless possibilities of the British short story. This is the first anthology capacious enough to celebrate the full diversity and energy of its writers, subjects and tones. The most famous authors are here, and many others, including some magnificent stories never republished since their first appearance in magazines and periodicals. The Penguin Book of the British Short Story has a permanent authority, and will be reached for year in and year out. This volume takes the story from its origins with Defoe, Swift and Fielding to the 'golden age' of the fin de siècle and Edwardian period. Edited and with an introduction by Philip Hensher, the award-winning novelist, critic and journalist.
Lemistry
We know Stanislaw Lem, whether or not we consciously know that we do. He may only be recognised in the West as the author of the twice-filmed novel, Solaris, but the influence of his other work is legion. From computer games (The Sims was inspired by one of his short stories), to films (the red and blue pills of The Matrix owe much to his Futurological Congress); from the space comedies of Red Dwarf to the metaphysical satires of Douglas Adams... the presence of this masterly Polish writer can be traced far and wide. Nor was his genius confined to fiction. Lem's essays and pseudo-essays borne out of the military industrial tensions of the Cold War have outlived their original context and spe...
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story: 2
TELEGRAPH, INDEPENDENT, FINANCIAL TIMES AND OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015 Hilarious, exuberant, subtle, tender, brutal, spectacular, and above all unexpected: these two extraordinary volumes contain the limitless possibilities of the British short story. This is the first anthology capacious enough to celebrate the full diversity and energy of its writers, subjects and tones. The most famous authors are here, and many others, including some magnificent stories never republished since their first appearance in magazines and periodicals. The Penguin Book of the British Short Story has a permanent authority, and will be reached for year in and year out. This volume takes the story from the 1920s to the present day. Edited and with an introduction by Philip Hensher, the award-winning novelist, critic and journalist.
The New Uncanny
This collection brings together 15 specially commissioned stories by internationally acclaimed writers and filmmakers, to explore and update Freud's classic theory of 'The Uncanny' - his piercing and all-encompassing dissection of what gives us the creeps.
The New Abject
SOMETHING HAS FALLEN AWAY. We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject. Following the success of Comma’s award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject – Julia Kristeva’s theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Georges Bataille’s societal equivalent – with visceral stories of modern unease. As we become ever-more isolated by social media bubbles, or the demands for social distancing, our moral gag-reflex is increasingly sensitised, and our ability to tolerate difference, or ‘the other’, atrophies. Like all good horror writing, these stories remind us that exposure to what unsettles us, even in small doses, is always better than pretending it doesn’t exist. After all, we can never be wholly free of that which belongs to us.
The Book of Tokyo
A shape-shifter arrives at Tokyo harbour in human form, set to embark on an unstoppable rampage through the city’s train network… A young woman is accompanied home one night by a reclusive student, and finds herself lured into a flat full of eerie Egyptian artefacts… A man suspects his young wife’s obsession with picnicking every weekend in the city’s parks hides a darker motive… At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them....
The Book of Tbilisi
A rookie reporter, searching for his first big story, re-opens a murder case that once saw crowds of protestors surround Tbilisi's central police station... A piece of romantic graffiti chalked outside a new apartment block sends its residents into a social media frenzy, trying to identify the two lovers implicated by it.... A war-orphaned teenager looks after his dying sister in an abandoned railway carriage on the edge of town, hoping that someday soon the state will take care of them... 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 o...
THE UNIVERSE DELIVERS THE ENEMY YOU NEED
Plant-based skyscrapers, reluctant sex robots, pencil-wielding black-belts fighting a zombie apocalypse... Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Adam Marek’s third collection: an almanac of the absurd, a handbook to the hardware problems of being human. From driverless bodies, to life-coaching AIs, to sleep research on primates, to the effects of time dilation on married life... these stories explore the unlikeliest of possibilities the future may hold for us, as a race, but at their heart is a paradox: what happens when the seemingly limitless potential of human ability runs up against the insurmountable inadequacies of basic human psychology? Sons never forgive their fathers. Superheroes are brought low by simple performance anxiety. Billionaire space industrialists are exposed by their bad parenting skills. Hardwired into our humanity, it seems, are bugs that no amount of future upgrades can ever fix.
