A merchant sailor works for a decade, captaining a yacht up and down the coasts of Malaysia, in the hope that his crooked employer will stay true to a promise...Years after a pandemic sweeps across Europe, wiping out its all-white population, a pilgrim returns to his Polish birthplace in search of the only other non-white kid he knew at school...An inscrutable hotelier loses his composure when a secret passage is discovered in his hotel, leading to a mysterious room and a p...

**From the widely acclaimed author of The Gone-Away World and Tigerman, comes a virtuosic new novel set in a near-future, high-tech surveillance state, that is equal parts dark comedy, gripping detective story, and mind-bending philosophical puzzle."A Pynchonesque mega-novel that periodically calls to mind the films of Inception and The Matrix…. What a ride!" —The Washington Post**In the world of Gnomon, citizens are constantly o...

The inspiration behind the hit podcast THE 100 TYPES OF HUMAN with DEXTER DIAS and BBC 5 Live host NIHAL ARTHANAYAKE'This book is the one. Think Sapiens and triple it.' - Julia Hobsbawm, author of Fully Connected_______________________________We all have ten types of human in our head.They're the people we become when we face life's most difficult decisions. We want to believe there ...

A unique, remarkable and hilarious portrait of one our most talked-about and controversial literary figures.Matthew De Abaitua, fresh out of university, is being interviewed for a job. The interview involves discussing literature, honking on a special cigarette and shooting at empty whisky bottles with an air rifle. The job in question is that of amanuensis, or live-in personal assistant. The employer is Will Self, the enfant terrible of...

A book of voices, landscapes and seasons, Ann Quin's newly republished novel mirrors the multiplicity of meanings of the very word 'passage' – of music, of time, and of life itself. A woman, accompanied by her lover, searches for her lost brother, who may have been a revolutionary, and who may have been tortured, imprisoned or killed. Roving through a Mediterranean landscape, they live out their entangled existences, reluctant to give up, afraid of the outcome.Reflecting the schizo...

In the language of fan fiction, a 'Mary Sue' is an idealised and implausibly flawless character: a female archetype that can infuriate audiences for its perceived narcissism.Such is the setting for this brilliant and important debut by Sophie Collins. In a series of verse and prose collages, Who Is Mary Sue? exposes the presumptive politics behind writing and readership: the idea that men invent while women reflect; that a man writes of the world outside ...

In a world that demands faith in progress and growth, Limbo is a companion for the stuck, the isolated, delayed, stranded and those in the dark. Fusing memoir with a meditation on creative block and a cultural history of limbo, Dan Fox considers the role that fallow periods and states of inbetween play in art and life. Limbo is an essay about getting by when you can't get along, employing a cast of artists, ghosts and sailors – including the author's older brother who, in...

Resilience looks upwards to the ever-changing, ever-present skies, where fingers and fist touch the horizon. Resilience is often deeply imagined and hard won. Resilience, by turn, is fervent, supple, rhizomatic, generative. Like the beguiling evenness of an orchid, resilience is enduring and delicate.To celebrate its 15th year Mascara Literary Review presents their first print anthology, featuring writing that addresses and explores the theme of resilience through...

Do you ever search in vain for exactly the right word? Perhaps you want to articulate the vague desire to be far away. Or you can’t quite convey that odd urge to go outside and check to see if anyone is coming. Maybe you’re struggling to express there being just the right amount of something – not too much, but not too little. While the English may not have a word for it, the good news is that the Greeks, the Norwegians, the Dutch or possibly the Inuits probably do.Whether it’s the...

An irresistible collection of favorite writings from an author celebrated for his bravura style and sheer unpredictability Francis Spufford’s welcome first volume of collected essays gathers an array of his compelling writings from the 1990s to the present. He makes use of a variety of encounters with particular places, writers, or books to address deeper questions relating to the complicated relationship between story-telling and truth-telling. How must a nonfiction w...

The "fresh, provocative, engrossing" literary journal explores the nature of power in its various forms with new stories, essays, and poetry (BBC.com).Spouse to spouse, soldier to citizen, looker to gazed upon, power is never static: it is either demonstrated or deployed. This thought-provoking issue of the acclaimed literary anthology Freeman's explores who gets to say what matters in a time of social upheaval.Margaret Atwood posits it is time to up...

Funny, moving, insightful, these stories are, above all, delightfully different. A well-known poet pursues his elusive muse; a Kiwi makes himself indispensable in OZ; a revolutionary fast-food franchise revs up Russia's economy; a racing-car driver is airborne; a Frenchman called Foucault puts in the hard yards at an antipodean dairy farm - all while water laps at our feet, our homes, our lives . . . With Tim Jones' stories you should expect the unexpected. This remarkably...