Books published by Comma Press

From legends of the desert to horrors of the forest, Blasim's stories blend the fantastic with the everyday, the surreal with the all-too-real. The result is a masterclass in metaphor - a new kind of story-telling, forged in the crucible of war, and just as shocking. Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014.

Being short, you might think the story's 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 shouldn't be made up of, what it should and shouldn't 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 don't have closure, argues one contributor, 'because life doesn't 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 Hawthorne's 'Twice Told Tales' to Kafka's modernist nightmares, these essays offer new and unique inroads into classic texts, both for the literature student and aspiring writer.

It seems probable that there are no more moss witches; the times are cast against them. But you can never be certain. In that sense they are like their mosses; they vanish from sites they are known to have flourished in, they are even declared extinct and then they are there again, there or somewhere else, small, delicate but triumphant, alive. Moss Witches, like mosses, do not compete; they retreat... Each story in Sara Maitland's collection enacts a daring kind of alchemy, fusing together raw elements of scientific theory with ancient myth, folkloric archetype and contemporary storytelling. As the laboratory smoke settles, we are treated to a new strain of narrative: a hybrid of fiction and non-fiction, the atavistic and the futuristic. We re also introduced to a weird and wonderful cast of characters: identical twins who fight bitterly day and night for purely quantum mechanical reasons; an expert on bird migration awaiting the homecoming of her lover on the windswept shores of the Hebrides. All the more remarkable is that each of these stories sprang from a conversation with a scientist and grew directly out of cutting-edge research. As befits their hybrid nature, each is also accompanied by an afterword, specially written by the consulting scientist to introduce us to the wonder behind the weirdness.

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.

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 characters in David Constantine's fourth collection are often delicately caught in moments of defiance. Disregarding their age, their family, or the prevailing political winds, they show us a way of marking out a space for resistance and taking an honest delight in it. Witness Alphonse having broken out of an old people s home, changed his name, and fled the country now pedalling down the length of the Rhone, despite knowing he has barely six months to live. Or the clergyman who chooses to spend Christmas Eve and the last few hours in his job in a frozen, derelict school, dancing a wild jig with a vagrant called Goat. Key to these characters defiance is the power of fiction, the act of holding real life at arm s length and simply telling a story be it of the future they might claim for themselves, or the imagined lives of others. Like them, Constantine s bewitching, finely-wrought stories give us permission to escape, they allow us to side-step the inexorable traffic of our lives, and beseech us to take possession of the moment.

Iraq + 100 poses a question to ten Iraqi writers: what might your country look like in the year 2103 - a century after the disastrous American- and British-led invasion, and 87 years down the line from its current, nightmarish battle for survival?

A unique anthology of ten stories set in the dazzling metropolis of contemporary Tokyo, translated into English for the first time.

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.

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.

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.