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Many of the characters in Martyn Bedford's stories find themselves at a point of redefinition, trading in their old identity for something new. Whether it is an act of retreat or escape - fantasising about storming out of a thankless job, or just avoiding a bad-tempered husband for a few moments on Christmas day - they each understand the first step in changing a reality, is to reconstruct it.

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 of brain activity: a vital stage in the re-wiring of memories, the learning of new skills, and the processing of problems and emotions. How will storytelling respond to this new and emerging science of sleep? Here, 14 authors have been invited to work with key scientists to explore various aspects of sleep research: from the possibilities of sleep engineering and overnight therapies , to future-tech ways of harnessing sleep s problem-solving powers, to the challenges posed by our increasingly 24-hour lifestyles. Just as new hypotheses are being put forward, old hunches are also being confirmed (there s now a scientific basis for the time-worn advice to sleep on a problem ). As these responses show, sleep and the spinning of stories are still very much entwined. This project was supported by the Wellcome Trust.

This anthology brings together some of the pioneers of the Gazan short story, as well as younger exponents of the form, with ten stories that offer glimpses of life in the Strip that go beyond the global media headlines; stories of anxiety, oppression, and violence, but also of resilience and hope, and of what it means to be a Palestinian today.

This anthology brings together ten short stories that go beyond the postcards and snapshots, and introduce us to real residents of Rio - young dancers training to be the next stars of samba, exhausted labourers press-ganged into meeting an impossible deadline, nostalgic drag queens... that make Rio the 'marvellous city' it is.

Mish Green - a former aid worker in Darfur - re-tells the story of the 2004 civil war from 15 different perspectives, capturing by turns the brutal indifference of the government war machine, the terrible scars inflicted on individuals caught in its path, and the complex melting pot of experiences that constitutes any relief effort.

What do we mean by small town? How has this innocuous term one up from village, a couple down from city, come to function as a pejorative? Pressed to describe what the phrase small town conjures up, we'd be hard pushed to say anything positive: closed-minded; petty; provincial; parochial. On a broad European canvas, however, the rich traditions of short story writing challenge these preconceptions. The stories collected here are neither narrow-minded nor petty, nor do the minds of their protagonists contract to fit their environment. In Germany, a house-husband is slowly sent over the edge by his over-achieving neighbours. In the town of Odda in Norway, a middle-aged Morrissey fan has a matter of hours to find a girlfriend so his ailing mother can die in peace. It s the small gestures a white lie, the turning of a blind eye, a small kindness or a secret kept that allow the characters of these communities to survive, to breathe easily within the seemingly tight strictures life there can impose. It s how we do things round here...

Bringing together fiction from some of the city's most celebrated writers, The Book of Liverpool traces the unique contours that decades of social and economic change can impress on a city. Part of the Reading the City series.

From legends of the desert to horrors of the forest, Blasim's stories blend the fantastic with the everyday, the surreal with the all-too-real. The result is a masterclass in metaphor - a new kind of story-telling, forged in the crucible of war, and just as shocking. Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014.

The poetry of Gaia Holmes delves deep beneath the urban and the quotidian to reveal a strange and exotic other-life. This, her much-anticipated second collection, champions the survivor and celebrates the indomitability of the self, measuring at each turn the cost suffered against the hope retained, the loss still felt against the new-found strength of starting afresh.

Being short, you might think the story's structure would yield an answer to this question more readily than, say, the novel. But for as long as the short story has been around, arguments have raged as to what it should and shouldn't be made up of, what it should and shouldn't do. Here, 15 leading contemporary practitioners offer structural appreciations of past masters of the form as well as their own perspectives on what the short story does so well. The best short stories don't have closure, argues one contributor, 'because life doesn't have closure'; 'plot must be written with the denouement constantly in view,' quotes another. Covering a century of writing that arguably saw all the major short forms emerge, from Hawthorne's 'Twice Told Tales' to Kafka's modernist nightmares, these essays offer new and unique inroads into classic texts, both for the literature student and aspiring writer.

It seems probable that there are no more moss witches; the times are cast against them. But you can never be certain. In that sense they are like their mosses; they vanish from sites they are known to have flourished in, they are even declared extinct and then they are there again, there or somewhere else, small, delicate but triumphant, alive. Moss Witches, like mosses, do not compete; they retreat... Each story in Sara Maitland's collection enacts a daring kind of alchemy, fusing together raw elements of scientific theory with ancient myth, folkloric archetype and contemporary storytelling. As the laboratory smoke settles, we are treated to a new strain of narrative: a hybrid of fiction and non-fiction, the atavistic and the futuristic. We re also introduced to a weird and wonderful cast of characters: identical twins who fight bitterly day and night for purely quantum mechanical reasons; an expert on bird migration awaiting the homecoming of her lover on the windswept shores of the Hebrides. All the more remarkable is that each of these stories sprang from a conversation with a scientist and grew directly out of cutting-edge research. As befits their hybrid nature, each is also accompanied by an afterword, specially written by the consulting scientist to introduce us to the wonder behind the weirdness.

Spanning centuries and continents, the stories in this collection amount to a tour de force of literary worldbuilding. From deeply insecure time travellers to medieval mystics and futuristic body modification cults, Norminton's characters find themselves torn between conflicting impulses - temptation and fortitude, hubris and shame, longing and regret. By turns sad, strange and darkly comic, The Ghost Who Bled reveals a master storyteller of incredible range.

Intelligent clothing, superhero dictators, contagion-carrying computer games, cross-species reproduction... Welcome to the strange and startling world of Adam Marek; a menagerie of futuristic technology, sinister traditions and scientifically-grounded superpowers a place where the absurd and the mundane are not merely bedfellows, but interbreed. Pulsing at the core of Adam Marek's much-anticipated second collection is a single, unifying theme: a parent s instinct to protect a particularly vulnerable child. Whether set amid unnerving visions of the near-future, or grounded in the domestic here-and-now, these stories demonstrate that, sometimes, only outright surrealism can do justice to the merciless strangeness of reality, only the fantastically illogical can steel us against what ordinary life threatens.

The characters in David Constantine's fourth collection are often delicately caught in moments of defiance. Disregarding their age, their family, or the prevailing political winds, they show us a way of marking out a space for resistance and taking an honest delight in it. Witness Alphonse having broken out of an old people s home, changed his name, and fled the country now pedalling down the length of the Rhone, despite knowing he has barely six months to live. Or the clergyman who chooses to spend Christmas Eve and the last few hours in his job in a frozen, derelict school, dancing a wild jig with a vagrant called Goat. Key to these characters defiance is the power of fiction, the act of holding real life at arm s length and simply telling a story be it of the future they might claim for themselves, or the imagined lives of others. Like them, Constantine s bewitching, finely-wrought stories give us permission to escape, they allow us to side-step the inexorable traffic of our lives, and beseech us to take possession of the moment.

The characters in Mirja Unge's debut collection are all, in their own way, evading something; whether failing to confront the true nature of an encounter, or avoiding responsibilities as a parent, sibling or friend. Abuse, betrayal and neglect lurk beneath a veneer of mutually maintained 'normality', waiting for an opportunity to resurface.

Iraq + 100 poses a question to ten Iraqi writers: what might your country look like in the year 2103 - a century after the disastrous American- and British-led invasion, and 87 years down the line from its current, nightmarish battle for survival?

A unique anthology of ten stories set in the dazzling metropolis of contemporary Tokyo, translated into English for the first time.

Identity, in Guy Ware's confident debut collection, is a mercurial thing. Lawyers paint conflicting pictures of an alleged terrorist; a city trader decides, without warning, to walk out of her life; flirting lovers take role-play to a new, existential, level. Whether living under a totalitarian regime or simply getting through the day in a grindingly predictable metropolis, Ware's characters struggle with the urge to redefine themselves, to start again, to reboot.

From human trafficking in the forests of Serbia, to the nightmares of an exile trying to embrace a new life in Amsterdam, Blasim's stories present an uncompromising view of the West's relationship with Iraq, taking in everything from the Iran-Iraq War through to the Occupation, offering a haunting critique of the post-war refugee experience.

The characters in David Constantine's collection are united by an urge to absent themselves, to abscond from the intolerable pressures of normal life and withdraw into strange ideas, political causes and private languages. Such is the force of Constantine's compassion, however, we cannot help but follow each character into their isolation.

Picking up the primary scent of any investigation, this anthology of wicked tales paints a chilling portrait of modus operandi--the signature that identifies any repeat offender. In this collection of villainous narratives, a coroner reveals a body's telltale clues to his students as he unwittingly dissects his own relationship, a broken-down driver turns his roadside routine into a quite different type of pick-up, and two creative-writing tutors discuss the merits of "hard-boiled" versus "cozy" schools of crime writing while a murderous student points out that it's really procedure that counts. From the ex-doctor tenderly administering a final prescription to his victims to the party of finishing school debutantes exacting revenge on their lecherous host, these stories demonstrate that, even with the most despicable of crimes, there is always methodology within the madness.

Following the death of her husband, a literary biographer resolves to turn her professional skills to the task of piecing together aspects of his life, in particular, a journey he made years before they met. David Constantine's passionate tale of grief marks only the second novel for an author whose short fiction has won international acclaim.

A young woman sees a dead body for the first time; a sister watches her anorexic sibling transform into a different person; a girl pieces together the facts of a custody battle. Wetzel's stories catch people when some part of their lives has been put on pause, leaving them so adrift only acts of obsession or self-destruction provide direction.

In the middle of a speech a businessman realises his soul has just left his body. In an Athens marketplace, a jealous lover finds himself staggering through a vision of hell. High in the Alps, a young woman's body re-appears in the glacier, perfectly preserved, where she fell 50 years before. Entering Constantine's stories is like stepping out into a wind of words, a swarm of language. His prose is as fluid as the water that surges and swells through all his landscapes. Yet, against this fluidity, his stories are able to stop time, to freeze-frame each protagonist's life just at the moment when the past breaks the surface, or when the present - like the dam of the title - collapses under its own weight. Features 'In Another Country' - recently been adapted for the big screen '45 Years' starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay.