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Brace Yourselves

Comma Press is a Manchester-based press founded, and funded, expressly to publish short fiction, which it does in the form of both full collections and series of anthologies.

The series include one of ‘City’ anthologies — each devoted to a single British, European or Eastern city — and one of spectra of new and established writers, each anthology titled after, appropriately, punctuation terms: Comma, Bracket, Hyphen, and Brace, the latter containing a story of mine (burst of self-promotion now over) alongside some excellent work such as that of the up-and-coming Guy Ware (now up-and-come: his full collection, You Have Twentyfour Hours To Love Us, has recently appeared to very favourable reviews).

Another series is now underway, ground-breaking in its approach and subject: the connexion between fiction and science. The first was Litmus, stories related to specific scientific areas of research, containing a story — ‘The Heart Of Denis Noble’ — by Alison MacLeod which was praised highly and reprinted, deservedly so in my opinion.

The latest in the series, due out now, is Bio-Punk, with the same approach, restricted to bio-medical research and bio-ethics.

This is an exciting approach to fiction, widening its relevance and reception, Litmus being reviewed in New Scientist as well as the literary reviews, and I hope will continue in this exploration.

As for Comma’s single-author collections, other than Guy Ware, they include: Zoe Lambert’s The War Tour, which has been very well received, as well as short-listed for the Edge Hill Prize for short stories, alongside A.J. Ashworth; Adam Marek’s new The Stone Thrower, following up his earlier cult hit Instruction Manual For Swallowing; and three collections by David Constantine — Under The Dam, The Shieling, and, newly out, Tea At The Midland.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Comma Press; publishing Constantine’s short fiction alone justifies their existence, apart from their other achievements. Constantine has had a distinguished career as poet and translator — with his wife he was editor until recently of Modern Poetry In Translation. Now he has begun a new career as one of our best short fiction writers; at his often and considerable best, he is the heir to D.H. Lawrence, by far the most important short story writer England has produced.

The title stories of Constantine’s first two collections — ‘Under The Dam’ and ‘The Shieling’ — in particular have a Lawrentian passion and lyricism that impressed me hugely. I haven’t yet read the new collection; its title reminds me somewhat more of William Trevor, which is also praise in itself, and the title story has been read on radio to much acclaim.

There is, however, an international scope in Comma’s output; it includes not just the ‘City’ series, but collections by, inter alia, the Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim (an interestingly personal and possibly unique take on the Iraq war) and the Polish writer Pawel Huelle.

I read Huelle’s second novel — Castorp — a few years ago, the title alluding to Hans Castorp, hero (of a sort) of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, my favourite novel, and depicting him in his earlier, pre-mountainous life as an engineering student. Disappointingly, I couldn’t really see anything of Mann’s creation in Huelle’s. But the stories — Cold Sea Stories — are presumably unManned and very different.

Comma then, although again run by a small but dedicated staff, punch well above their weight in British publishing. They do, though, have a slightly unusual advantage in that, although entirely independent, they work under the aegis, or more prosaically the umbrella, of the larger Carcanet Press.

Carcanet are, under editor Michael Schmidt, primarily a poetry publisher, but they also produce a smaller number of quality fiction titles, and have a desirable and critically important back-list. This list includes Clarice Lispector — her work gaining renewed attention in the wake of a biography — Christine Brooke-Rose, and above all (for me) a complete or near-complete list of Ford Madox Ford, both his critical writings and his fiction.

Ford has long been one of my heroes; he as much as Pound helped to kick-start and maintain Modernism in this country, and in fact Pound himself owed a lot to Ford in his first attempts at modernizing himself. Ford as editor and propagandist worked tirelessly to champion Modernist values and writers, including Conrad (they were friends and sometime collaborators), Wyndham Lewis, Hemingway and Joyce. Maybe in consequence, his own fiction has been shamefully neglected until lately. Although his novel The Good Soldier is well established as a classic, although with the dubious reputation as a work by a ‘writer’s writer’, his magnum opus, the tetralogy Parade’s End, is only now coming into its own, following a BBC dramatization scripted by Tom Stoppard which has been received with somewhat respectful enthusiasm.

This is one of the really great Modernist novels, up there with Ulysses, Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, Doblin’s Berlin, Alexanderplatz, Mann and Musil. Yet in typically British fashion, has been long neglected. It existed, and exists, in a single-volume Penguin Modern Classic, and a similar single-volume edition from Carcanet, but this Carcanet edition has been superseded by the recently completed publication of the tetralogy in its constituent books in a well-annotated critical edition.

It is very much hoped, by me and I’m sure others, that this edition gains attention and momentum in the wake of the dramatised version. Britain has far too few geniuses to allow such neglect.

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