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 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.
Author Biography:
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 Doestoevsky Wannabe Cities series. Lucie McKnight Hardy grew up in rural West Wales, the daughter of London immigrants, speaking Welsh. She studied English at the University of Liverpool, and creative writing with the OU. Her first novel Water Shall Refuse Them (Dead Ink, 2017) was shortlisted for the Mslexia Novel Award. 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. 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. 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). Christine Poulson had a career as an art historian before she turned to crime. She has written three crime thrillers set in Cambridge, featuring the academic turned amateur detective, Cassandra James, the most recent being Footfall. She has also written widely on nineteenth century art and literature and is a research fellow in the Department of Nineteenth Century Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her most recent novel is Invisible, a standalone suspense novel. David Constantine has published several volumes of poetry, and two novels (most recently The Life-Writer) as well as five short story collections, including The Dressing-Up Box and 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. 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. Bernadine Bishop (1939-2013) was an English novelist, teacher and psychotherapist. 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. In 1960 she was the youngest witness in the Lady Chatterley Trial. 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.
