edited by Sarah Eyre & Ra Page

ISBN:1905583184
ISBN-13: 978 1905583188
£7.95 or £6.75 if you buy online now.
Published: 4 Dec 2008, but advance copies available to order now!

To order online from outside the UK click here.
** Winner of the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Anthology**

Featuring:
A.S. Byatt, Christopher Priest, Ramsey Campbell, Etgar Keret, Hanif Kureishi, Sara Maitland, Alison MacLeod, Jane Rogers, Gerard Woodward, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Nicholas Royle, Ian Duhig, Matthew Holness, and Adam Marek.

About the Book

In 1919 Sigmund Freud published an essay that delved deep into the tradition of horror writing and claimed to understand one of its darkest tricks. Like a mad scientist, he performed literary vivisection on a still-breathing body of work, exploring its inner anatomy, and pulling out mysterious organs for classification. His aim: to present to the world a complete theory of ‘das unheimliche’, the uncanny.

In the spirit of this great experiment, 14 leading authors have here been challenged to write fresh fictional interpretations of what the uncanny might mean in the 21st century, to update Freud’s famous checklist of what gives us the creeps, and to give the hulking canon of uncanny fiction a shot in the arm, a shock to the neck-bolts...

'It’s not too great a stretch to see Comma as the literary equivalent of Factory Records.'
- The Herald, 2 Dec.
'Delightful and disturbing'
- The Independent on Sunday, 14 Dec.
'A masterclass in understated creepiness... a deliciously macabre collection that the old Austrian might well have enjoyed.'
- Book of the Week, Time Out, 12 Jan.
'If we need the uncanny – and I suspect we do – then we also need it updating... laudable.'
- Book of the Week, The Independent, 2 Jan.
'A bold idea.'
- The Guardian, 3 Jan.
Listen to AS Byatt and Alison MacLeod discuss the book on Radio 3's The Verb (scroll to 1:18:30 in).
Listen to AS Byatt read from her story and discuss the uncanny with Neil Gaiman on BBC Radio's The Strand, broadcast Thu 30 Oct 08.

About the Authors

A. S. Byatt was born in Sheffied, South Yorkshire, and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge, and Somerville College, Oxford, She is the author of eight novels to date: Shadow of a Sun (1964), The Game (1967), The Virgin in the Garden (1978) Still Life (1985) which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, Babel Tower (1996), A Whistling Woman (2002), Possession: A Romance (1990), won the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and The Biographer’s Tale (2000). She has also written two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects, several works of non-fiction, and five collections of short stories: Sugar and Other Stories (1987); The Matisse Stories (1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994), and Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998). She was made a dame in 1999 and currently lives in London.

Ramsey Campbell is described by the Oxford Companion to English Literature as ‘Britain’s most respected living horror writer’, and in 1991 was voted the Horror Writer’s Horror Writer in the Observer Magazine. His many award-winning novels include The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, The Overnight, and The Grin of the Dark. He has also published thirteen collections of short stories to date, most recently Told by the Dead (2003).

Frank Cottrell Boyce is a novelist and screenwriter. His film credits include Welcome to Sarajevo, Hilary and Jackie, Code 46, 24 Hour Party People and A Cock and Bull Story. In 2004, his debut novel Millions won the Carnegie Medal and was shortlisted for The Guardian Children’s Fiction Award. His second novel, Framed, was published by Macmillan in 2005. He also writes for the theatre and was the author of the highly acclaimed BBC film God on Trial. He has previously contributed stories to Comma’s anthologies Phobic and The Book of Liverpool.

Ian Duhig has published four poetry collections, including Nominies (1998) which was named as one of the 1998 Sunday Times Poetry Books of the Year and received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation; and most recently, Lammas Hireling (2003) which was a Poetry Book Society Choice. His first short story was published in The Book of Leeds (Comma, 2007).

Matthew Holness won the Perrier Comedy Award in 2001 for Garth Marenghi’s Netherhead, and has since appeared in The Office, Casanova, and his own Channel 4 television series Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and Man to Man With Dean Learner. His first short story was published in Phobic (Comma, 2007).

Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer whose award-winning short story collections include Pipelines, Gaza Blues (with Samir El Youssef), The Bus Driver Who Thought He Was God, The Nimrod Flip-Out, and Missing Kissinger. He is the author of three graphic novels, several award-winning scripts for TV, and the novella Kneller’s Happy Campers, which was adapted by director Goran Dukic into a feature-length film Wristcutters: A Love Story starring Patrick Fugit and Tom Waits. His fiction has been translated into sixteen languages and has been the basis for more than 40 short films.

Hanif Kureishi's first play, Soaking the Heat, was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1976. Since then he has enjoyed success as a playwright, screenwriter, novelist and short story writer. His first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, was published in 1990 to widespread acclaim, and won the Whitbread First Novel Award. He has published also three collections of short stories: Love in a Blue Time, Midnight All Day and The Body and Other Stories.

Alison MacLeod is the author of two novels, The Changeling and The Wave Theory of Angels. Her first collection of short stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction, was published in 2007. She lives in Brighton and teaches creative writing at the University of Chichester.

Sara Maitland grew up in Galloway and studied at Oxford University. Her first novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, was published in 1978 and won the Somerset Maugham Award. Novels since have included Three Times Table (1990), Home Truths (1993) and Brittle Joys (1999), and one cowritten with Michelene Wandor – Arky Types (1987). Her short story collections include Telling Tales (1983), A Book of Spells (1987) and most recently, On Becoming a Fairy Godmother (2003). In 2008 she published the non-fiction title A Book of Silence (Granta) to wide critical acclaim. As a filmwriter she has worked with Stanley Kubrick, and her short story 'Far North' was adapted into a feature film directed by Asif Kapadia, starring Michelle Yeoh and Sean Bean.

Adam Marek’s stories first appeared in Parenthesis (Comma 2006), and New Writing 15, edited by Maggie Gee and Bernardine Evaristo. His debut collection Instruction Manual for Swallowing was published by Comma Press in 2007.

Christopher Priest is the author of ten novels and two collections of short stories. The Glamour won the 1988 Kurd Lasswitz Best Novel award and The Prestige won the 1995 World Fantasy Award, the 1995 James Tait Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. In 2006 it was adapted into a feature film by Christopher Nolan.

Jane Rogers was born in London in 1952 and lived in Birmingham, New York State (Grand Island) and Oxford, before doing an English degree at Cambridge University. She has written seven novels, including Separate Tracks, Mr Wroe’s Virgins, Island and Voyage Home, as well as original television and radio drama. Her short stories were collected in Ellipsis 2 (Comma 2007).

Nicholas Royle is the author of five novels – Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams, The Matter of the Heart, The Director’s Cut and Antwerp – as well as one collection of short stories, Mortality (Serpent’s Tail, 2006). He has edited twelve anthologies of short fiction including A Book of Two Halves, The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers’ Dreams, The Time Out Book of New York Short Stories, and Dreams Never End (Tindal Street Press).

Gerard Woodward was born in London in 1961 and studied art and anthropology. He has published four poetry collections: Householder (1991), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; After the Deafening (1994); Island to Island (1999); and We Were Pedestrians (2005). His first novel, August, was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread First Novel Award, and was followed in 2004 by I’ll Go To Bed At Noon (2004), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and the third in this semi-autobiographical series, A Curious Earth (2007). His first collection of short stories The Caravan Thieves was published this year.

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