The New Abject: Tales of Modern Unease
About this ebook
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 Georges Bataille’s societal equivalent – with visceral stories of modern unease. As we become ever-more isolated by social media bubbles, or the demands for social distancing, our moral gag-reflex is increasingly sensitised, and our ability to tolerate difference, or ‘the other’, atrophies. Like all good horror writing, these stories remind us that exposure to what unsettles us, even in small doses, is always better than pretending it doesn’t exist. After all, we can never be wholly free of that which belongs to us.
About the author
Ramsey Campbell is described by the Oxford Companion to English Literature as ‘Britain’s most respected living horror writer’. He is the author of over 30 novels (most recently The Way of the Worm (2018) and The Wise Friend(2020), six novellas, and hundreds of short stories, many of them widely considered classics in the field and winners of multiple literary awards.
David Constantine has published several volumes of poetry, and two novels (most recently The Life-Writer) as well as five short story collections: Back at the Spike (1994), the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (2005), The Shieling (2009), Tea at the Midland (2012), and The Dressing-Up Box (2019), as well as In Another Country: Selected Stories(2015), the title story of which was adapted by Andrew Haigh into 45 Years – an Oscar-nominated film, and starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling. He is the winner of the BBC National Short Story Award (2010) and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award (2013). He is also translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. He lives in Oxford.
Margaret Drabble was born in 1939 in Sheffield and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She had a very brief career as an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, before taking to fiction. Her first novel, A Summer Birdcage, was published in 1963, and her nineteenth and most recent, The Dark Flood Rises, in 2016. She also edited two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985, 2000). She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd and lives in London and Somerset.
Saleem Haddad (born 1983) is the author of the novel, Guapa (2016), which won the 2017 Polari Prize and was awarded a Stonewall Honour. His essays have appeared in Slate, The Daily Beast, LitHub, The Baffler and the LARB, among other places, and his short fiction in Palestine + 100 (Comma, 2019). He lives between Lisbon and Beirut.
Mark Haddon’s first novel for adults was the multi-award-winning The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time(2003), which was later adapted by Simon Stephens into a prize-winning play. His subsequent novels include A Spot of Bother (2006) and The Red House (2012). He has written for TV and radio and published one collection of poetry, The Talking Horse, the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea. His play, Polar Bears, was produced at the Donmar in 2010. His short stories have been shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the O’Henry Prize, and the BBC National Short Story Award. The Pier Falls, his first collection of short stories, was published by Cape in 2016.
Matthew Holness is a writer, director and actor. He created and starred in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace for Channel 4 and his short films include A Gun For George, The Snipist and Smutch. His stories have appeared in Phobic, The New Uncanny and Protest (all Comma). In 2018 he directed his first feature film, Possum, based on his contribution to The New Uncanny.
Adam Marek writes short stories about the futuristic and the fantastical colliding with everyday life. His two collections, The Stone Thrower and Instruction Manual for Swallowing, are published by Comma Press. His stories have appeared on BBC Radio 4, and in many magazines and anthologies, including The Penguin Book of the British Short Story. He is an Arts Foundation Short Story Fellow. He regularly teaches creative writing for Arvon, and occasionally works with SciFutures, using storytelling to help prototype the future. Visit Adam at www.adammarek.co.uk
Lucie McKnight Hardy’s stories have featured in various publications, including Best British Short Stories 2019, Black Static, The Lonely Crowd, and as a limited edition chapbook from Nightjar Press. Her debut novel, Water Shall Refuse Them (Dead Ink Books, 2019) was shortlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition and longlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award. Dead Relatives, her short story collection, will be published in late 2021, again by Dead Ink Books.
Mike Nelson is an installation artist who has twice been nominated for the Turner Prize (2001 and 2007), and in 2011 represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. Nelson’s installations typically exist only for the time period of the exhibition they were made for. They are generally extended labyrinths, which the viewer is free to find their own way through, and where the locations of the exit and entrance are often difficult to determine. His The Deliverance and the Patience in a former brewery on the Giudecca was in the 2001 Venice Biennale. In September 2007, his exhibition A Psychic Vacuum was held in the old Essex Street Market, New York. He is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London; 303 Gallery, New York; and Galleria Franco Noero, Turin.
Paul Theroux is an American travel writer and novelist, whose latest travel book is On the Plain of Snakes - A Mexican Journey (2019). He is the author of 27 novels – including The Mosquito Coast (1981), which won the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was adapted for the 1986 movie of the same name, and Doctor Slaughter(1984), which was filmed as Half Moon Street (1986) – as well as six separate collections of short stories, most recently Mr Bones: Twenty Stories (2014).
Lara Williams is the author of the short story collection Treats, which was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Edinburgh First Book Award and the Saboteur Awards. Her debut novel Supper Club has been translated into five languages, won the Guardian ‘Not the Booker’ Prize and was listed as a Book of the Year 2019 by TIME, Vogue and other publications. She lives in Manchester and is a contributor to the Guardian, Independent, Times Literary Supplement, Vice, Dazed and others.
Gerard Woodward is a novelist, poet and short story writer, best known for his trilogy of novels concerning the troubled Jones family, August (shortlisted for the Whitbread Book Award), I’ll Go to Bed at Noon (shortlisted for the 2004 Man-Booker Prize), and A Curious Earth (2008). He is the author of six collections of poetry and two collections of short fiction, The Caravan Thieves (2007) and Legoland (2016). His latest publication is the novel The Paper Lovers.
Sarah Schofield’s stories have been published in Lemistry, Bio-Punk, Thought X, Beta Life, Spindles andConradology
Before Christine Poulson turned to writing fiction, she was an academic with a PhD in History of Art. Her Cassandra James mysteries are set in Cambridge. Deep Water, the first in a new series featuring medical researcher Katie Flanagan, appeared in 2016. The second, Cold, Cold Heart, set in Antarctica, came out in 2018, and the third, An Air That Kills, in 2019. Her short stories have been published in Comma Press anthologies, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Crime Writers’ Association anthologies, the Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries and elsewhere. They have been short-listed for the Short Mystery Fiction Derringer, the Margery Allingham Prize, and the CWA Short Story Dagger.
Meave Haughey is a short story writer based in Birmingham. Recent stories have been published in Comma Press’s ebook, Forecast: New Writing from Birmingham, Doestoevsky Wannabe’s Love Bites: Fiction Inspired by Pete Shelley and Buzzcocks and in Birmingham, from the Dostoevsky Wannabe Cities series.
Gaia Holmes is a freelance writer and creative writing tutor who works with schools, universities, libraries and other community groups throughout the West Yorkshire region. She runs ‘Igniting The Spark’, a weekly writing workshop at Dean Clough, Halifax, and is the co-host of ‘MUSE-LI’, an online writing group. She has had three full length poetry collections published by Comma Press: Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (2006) Lifting The Piano With One Hand(2013), Where The Road Runs Out (2018) and Tales from the Tachograph, a collaborative work with Winston Plowes (Calder Valley Poetry, 2017). She is currently turning her attention towards writing short stories.
Karen Featherstone is a screenwriter and playwright, as well as a prose writer. She has written storylines for Coronation Street and Emmerdale and her work has been featured at the National Theatre Studio and broadcast by Channel 4. A Northern Writers’ Award winner, her stories have been published by Retreat West Books, Mslexia and Otranto House.
Alan Beard writes stories and flash fiction. He has published two collections, Taking Doreen Out of the Sky (Picador, 1999) and You Don’t Have to Say (Tindal Street Press, 2010). He won the Tom-Gallon award for best short story, and his work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and appeared in Best British Short Stories 2011 (Salt), Best Short Stories (Heinemann, 1991), and The Book of Birmingham (Comma, 2018), as well as in numerous UK, US and Canadian magazines.
Bernardine Bishop (1939-2013) was an English novelist, teacher and psychotherapist. In 1960 she was the youngest witness in the Lady Chatterley Trial. Her first novel, Perspectives, was published by Hutchinson in 1961, and her second Playing House in 1963. During a half-century break between publishing her first two novels and her third, the 2013 Costa prize-nominated Unexpected Lessons In Love, she brought up a family, taught, and practised as a psychotherapist.
