The third in a series of annual anthologies, The Best British Short Stories 2013 reprints the cream of short fiction, by British writers, first published in 2012. These stories appeared in magazines from the Edinburgh Review to Granta, in anthologies from various publishers, and in authors' own short story collections. They appeared online at 3:AM Magazine, Fleeting and elsewhere.This new anthology includes stories by: Charles Boyle, Reg...

There is something monstrous about capital, something alive and creeping about it. It’s been compared to a parasite, a vampire, a zombie-maker; one that transforms human lives into dead labour, and marshals all creative, free-thinking individuality into the long trudge that is work, money-making, aspiration. The philosopher Mark Fisher famously compared capital to the alien in John Carpenter’s The Thing: an ‘infinitely plastic entity capable of metabolising and absorbing anything with whic...

A decade after the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN still leads the world in the search to uncover what the universe is made of, how it was formed, and what fate may lie in store for it. If there is such a thing as a ‘cutting edge’, it surely lies 100 metres below the Swiss-French border, at the point where the beams collide.As part of a unique collaboration, this book pairs a team of award-winning authors with CERN physicists to explore some of the di...

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 a...

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 Geo...

Featuring leading scientists acting as consultants on the stories, and writing scientific afterwords, bringing the theory featured in the stories to life, including Prof. Sarah Bridle (Jodrell Bank), Prof. Jonathan Wolff and Prof. Frank Jackson (the inventor of the 'Mary's Room' thought experiment).Science is always telling stories. Whether in the creation myths of evolution or the Big Bang, or in the eureka moments of science history, narrative – just as much as metaphor – is a ke...

The relationship between sleep and storytelling is an ancient one. For centuries, sleep has provided writers with a magical ingredient – a passage of time during which great changes miraculously occur, an Orpheus-like voyage through the subconscious daubed with the fantastic. But over the last ten years, our scientific understanding of sleep has been revolutionised. No longer is sleep viewed as a time of simple rest and recuperation. Instead, it is proving to be an intensely dynamic period...

Featuring:Anna Ball, Suzanne Batty, Paul Browney, John Carnahan, Graham English, Tracey Emerson, Crista Ermiya, Thomas Fletcher, Alistair Herbert, Paul Hocker, Alice Kuipers, Adam Marek, Melanie Mauthner, Andy Murray, Gabriella Reed, C.D. Rose, Mandy Sutter, Pat Winslow, Ann Winter, L.E. Yates.Rampaging behemoths, giant, washed-up fishtails, mysterious briefcases, role-playing cuddly toys... The world of the short story is a weird and wonderful one, made ev...

'Fascinating reading.' - Financial Times'An exhilarating read.' - The Short ReviewToby Litt's Bio-Punk story 'Call it ''The Bug'' Because I Have No Time to Think of a Better Title' short-listed for the 2013 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.Featuring:AUTHORS: Jane Feaver, Simon Ings, Annie Kirby, Toby Litt, Sara Maitland, Adam Marek, Gregory Norminton, Sean O’Br...

Computers are changing. Soon the silicon chip will seem like a clunky antique amid the bounty of more exotic processes on offer. Robots are changing too; material evolution and swarm intelligence are creating a new generation of devices that will diverge and disperse into a balanced ecosystem of humans and ‘robjects’ (robotic objects). Somewhere in between, we humans will have to change also… in the way we interact with technology, the roles we adopt in an increasingly ‘intelligent’ enviro...

Humanity is overrated.**The tenth anniversary edition of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s critically acclaimed Children of Time – an epic story of humanity’s battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Winner of the 30th anniversary Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel.Contains the short story ‘Bearable’ exclusive to this edition.**Who will inherit this new Earth? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a ...

'There is no more carefully chosen yet eclectic anthology series in existence in Britain today' – Susan Haigh, The Short ReviewBest British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover – or more accurately, by its title. This new series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor's brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, ne...