Page 5 - Comma Press News Today

A collection of semi-fictional pieces based on real events and people interrogates American imperialism...

English PEN's latest grants for translations features work originating in Arabic, Farsi, Catalan, French, Chinese, Hindi, and more.

La Plage, from 1900, by artist Alfred-Victor Fournier - Credit: Getty Images CHARLIE CONNELLY offers his selection of perfect holiday reading, from the latest new European paperbacks I’m ready for the holidays. I’ve a clean vest ironed, a selection of handkerchiefs knotted in each corner to protect me from the sun’s harmful rays and I’ve been practising rolling up my trouser legs to mid-calf level for a couple of weeks now. This guy is, let me tell you, beach body ready. In this state o...

Reading Hassan Blasim's God 99 is an immersive experience of grief and exaltation, anger and disgust, writes Marcia Lynx Qualey. We join the Iraqi narrator as he sits around in seedy Finnish bars and plays slot machines; as he meets refugees and listens to their stories; as he exchanges letters with a dying friend; and as he crosses a kaleidoscopic series of borders

Reading Hassan Blasim's God 99 is an immersive experience of grief and exaltation, anger and disgust, writes Marcia Lynx Qualey. We join the Iraqi narrator as he sits around in seedy Finnish bars and plays slot machines; as he meets refugees and listens to their stories; as he exchanges letters with a dying friend; and as he crosses a kaleidoscopic series of borders

ACCORDING to critic and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, abjection involves either a confrontation with our sense of physical being or a separation between the self and a rejected “other.” Objects of revulsion can be tangible, such as faeces and bodily fluids, but some forms of dread are abstract and ambiguous.   The New Abject collection of horror stories draws on the broad nature of Kristeva’s definition, which has inspired a loosely related set of tales that deal with the things that mak...

The familiar Amazonian preview called ‘Look Inside’ gets a storefront cousin from Jellybooks Discovery, using QR codes to offer samples. 710 Bookseller Rebecca Chatwell at Blackwell’s Broad Street store in Oxford trying out Jellybooks’ QR code ‘peek inside’ book preview app called Discovery. Image: Jellybook QR Codes Put ‘Peek Inside’ on the High Street Almost 20 years ago, in the autumn of 2001, articles were moving about something called “Look Inside the Book” on Amazon.co...

BBC Sounds - Open Book - Available Episodes Open Book Programme looking at new fiction and non-fiction books, talking to authors and publishers and unearthing lost classics Episodes (577Available)

The Book of Ramallah About this Event Join Liverpool Arab Arts Festival and Comma Press for a journey to Ramallah, as we reflect on the latest title in Comma’s series on ‘Reading the City’. Edited by Beirut-born, Palestinian novelist Maya Abu Al-Hayat, who lives in Jerusalem and works in Ramallah, this anthology explores the city in all its countless contradictions. The Book of Ramallah features stories from ten established and emerging Palestinian writers, including Anas Abu Rahma, Lian...

Graham Sleight (2015) by Francesca Myman Publishing lead-times being what they are, the extraordinary events of 2020 largely weren’t reflected in the books that came out in the year – or at least, not intentionally. I managed to read a good deal of thought-provoking SF and fantasy this year, but some books seemed even more relevant than expected because of the pandemic-shuttered world they emerged into. How posterity will view them – let alone how it’ll view the books that’ll doubtles...