The nation's favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its tenth year.Best 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, newspapers and web sites, looking for the ...

What is the relationship between performance and play? Between performance and technology? Between performance and death?Certain Fragments is an extraordinary exploration of what lies at the heart of contemporary theatre. Written by the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, acknowledged to be Britains most brilliant experimental theatre company (Guardian), Certain Fragments investigates the processes of devising performance, the role of writing in an interdisciplinary...

Drawing together the work of 10 leading playwrights, this National Theatre Connections anthology features work by some of the most exciting and established contemporary playwrights. Gathered together in one volume, the plays collected offer young performers between the ages of 13 and 19 an engaging selection of material to perform, read or study.Each play has been specifically commissioned by the National Theatre's literary department with the young performer in mind. The ...

Known for both its industrial roots and arboreal abundance, Sheffield has always been a city of two halves.From its botanical gardens and elegant parks, to the brutalist high-rise estates of Park Hill, and the hinterland nightclubs of ‘Centertainment’, it is a city caught between the forges of the past and the melting pot of the present.Bringing together new short stories from some of the city’s most celebrated writers, The Book of Sheffield traces the contours of this comp...

How can an understanding of theatre in the city help us make sense of urban social experience?Theatre& the City explores how relationships between theatre, performance and the city affect social power dynamics, ideologies and people's sense of identity. The book evaluates both material conditions (such as architecture) and performative practices (such as urban activism) to argue that both these categories contribute to the complex economies and ecologies of theatre and per...

Kings, lords, liars, usherettes, goal-hangers, gun-men and prostitutes, Whether or not these stories bear any relation to life as it is lived in Endland (sic) is not my problem and good riddance to all those what prefer to read about truly good, lucky and nice people – you won't like this crap at all.A comical and brutal weave of parables gone wrong, Endland holds a broken mirror to England. In its garish but strangely familiar world of empty tower blocks, 24-hour cyber cafes and bomb site...

During its impressive career over the last decades the term 'performative' has been attributed with many parallel meanings in the humanities, philosophy, arts, or economics. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats additionally applies the notion of the performative to the context of curating with the aim to unfold a potential that so far has been mostly unused. The book is following J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and others in their belief in the performative capacity to transform reality with words and...

This diverse anthology features eight contemporary plays founded in testimonies from across the world. Showcasing challenging and provocative works of theatre, the collection also provides a clear insight into the workings of the genre through author interviews, introductions from the companies and performance images which illustrate the process of creating each piece.Bystander 9/11 by Meron Langsner is an impressionistic but wholly authentic response to the catast...

Screwed-up England and its characters channelled in strange, twisted, funny, cartoon-like innovative fiction that grasps our times better than straight realism.A comical and brutal weave of parables gone wrong. Endland holds a broken mirror to England. In its garish but strangely familiar world of empty tower blocks, 24-hour cyber cafes and bomb sites, a motley collection of misfits, wanderers and charmed drunks do their best to survive. Nothing is stable ...

Nine people arrive one night on Chelsea Bridge. They've never met. But at the same time, they run and leap to their deaths. Each of them received a letter in the post that morning, a pre-written suicide note and a page containing only four words: Nothing important happened today. That is how they knew they had been chosen to become a part of The People Of Choice: A mysterious suicide cult whose members have no knowledge of one another. By the morning, People Of Choice are appearing around ...

Thick with owls and badgers, oak trees and wood piles, scarecrows and ghosts, and Tom Cox's loud and excitable dad, this book is full of the folklore of several counties the ancient kind and the everyday variety as well as wild places, mystical spots and curious objects. Emerging from this focus on the detail are themes that are broader and bigger and more important than ever.Tom's writing treads a new path, one that has a lot in common with a rambling country walk; it's bewitched ...

Truth is often stranger than fiction, as this outstanding collection of urban myths and incredible stories vividly demonstrates. Among them you will find examples of amazing lawsuits, crazy criminals, humiliating misfortune, and embarrassing mistakes. What the stories all share is the capacity to make you wonder at the sheer richness of experience life has to offer - and the breath-taking stupidity of some people!