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Includes the Shirley Jackson Award shortlisted Judderman. London Incognita chronicles a city caught in the cycle of perpetual decline and continuous renewal: the English capital, groaning under the weight of two-thousand years of history, as seen through the eyes of its desperate and troubled inhabitants. A malicious presence from the 1970s resurfaces in the fevered alleyways of the city; an amnesiac goddess offers brittle comfort to the spirits of murdered shop-girls; and an obscure and forgotten London writer holds the key to a thing known as the emperor worm. As bombs detonate and buildings burn down, the city's selfish inhabitants hunt the ghosts of friends, family and lovers to the urban limits of the metropolis, uncovering the dark secrets of London.
An Unreliable Guide to London brings together 23 stories about the lesser known parts of a world renowned city. Stories that stretch the reader's definition of the truth and question reality. Stories of wind nymphs in South Clapham tube station, the horse sized swan at Brentford Ait, sleeping clinics in N1 and celebrations for St Margaret's Day of the Dead. Taking its cue from travel guides, London histories and books like Tired of London, Tired of Life, An Unreliable Guide to London shakes up the canon of London writing with a tongue firmly rooted in its cheek. An Unreliable Guide to London is the perfect summer read for city dwellers up and down the country. With a list of contributors reflecting the multilayered, complex social structures of the city, it is the guide to London, showing you everything that you never knew existed.
Lori works illegally in a rented flat in central London, living in fear of police raids which could mean losing her small daughter and her dream of a new life. Freya is a student who finds she can make far more money as an escort than she could in an office; life, after all, is already a tangle of madness and dissociation. And Paula is a journalist whose long-term campaign against prostitution has brought her some strange bedfellows. After a shock change to the law, with brothels being raided by the authorities, lives across the country are fractured. As a threat from Lori's past begins to catch up with her, the three women are increasingly, inevitably drawn into each other's orbit. The Service is a powerful and challenging novel about womens bodies, sex and relationships, mental health, entitlement, authenticity, privilege and power - as shocking as any dystopia, but touching and deeply humane.
Wise and funny, touching and true, What We’re Teaching Our Sons is for anyone who has ever wondered how to be a grown up.
How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy. Anderson sees the visionary architecture dreamed up by architects, artists, philosophers, writers, and citizens as wedded to the egalitarian sense that cities are for everyone. He proves that we must not be locked into the structures that exclude ordinary citizens--that cities evolve and that we can have input. As he says: "If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined as well.”
When Eliot first spies the booth at the end of the pier, he wonders what it is. The canvas is faded, the striped pattern barely visible beneath years of dirt. The wooden boards are stained and bare. It's the crude, handwritten sign that draws him closer, makes him reach out to pull the curtain aside. Enter the Shadow Booth, it says, and you will never be the same again. Welcome to The Shadow Booth, a new journal of weird and eerie fiction, edited by Dan Coxon. Drawing its inspiration from the likes of Thomas Ligotti and Robert Aickman, The Shadow Booth explores that dark, murky hinterland between mainstream horror and literary fiction. Volume 1 contains stories by: Gary Budden, Dan Carpenter, Malcolm Devlin, Stephen Hargadon, David Hartley, Richard V. Hirst, Timothy J. Jarvis, Alison Moore, Annie Neugebauer, Sarah Read, Joseph Sale, Richard Thomas and Paul Tremblay.
London, early-1970s. In a city plagued by football violence, Republican bombings, blackouts and virulent racism, a new urban myth is taking hold. Among the broken down estates, crumbling squats and failed projects of a dying metropolis, whispered sightings of a malevolent figure nicknamed the Judderman are spreading. A manifestation of the sick psyche of a city, or something else?