Gerard Woodward

Aldous Jones always takes his his family camping in Wales. He starts to see a symbiosis develop between their North London home and the Welsh village they only ever see in August. When the farm gets a milking parlour, the Jones get a new car. But Mrs Jones sees "the culling of the dairymaids."

August

"With her children evacuated and her husband at the front, Tory Pace is grudgingly sharing the family home with her irascible mother, working at the local gelatin factory--to help the war effort--and generally doing just about as well as could be expected in difficult times. Her quiet life is thrown into turmoil, however, when her prisoner-of-war husband, Donald, makes an outrageous demand for sexual gratification. He wants a dirty letter"--Dust jacket flap.

a novel

Letters from an unknown woman

A stunning new collection of stories from the Man Booker Prize and Whitbread Prize-shortlisted author.Many of Legoland's fifteen stories begin with Woodward's sharp and unflinching eye alighting upon an apparently everyday detail or situation, but then a sudden twist takes them to an unsettling place where life's normal rules no longer apply.Whether he's writing about domestic subjects - such as in 'The Unloved', when a woman in a dysfunctional marriage finally leaves home after decades of misery - or tackling large issues on a global stage - the tyranny of dictators in 'The Fall of Mr and Mrs Nicholson', or the invasion of an unnamed country in 'The Flag' - each story is full of Woodward's blacker-than-black humour, fearless surrealism, and gift for phrase-making.The collection also includes Woodward's brilliant story 'The Family Whistle', which was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, in which a woman's husband returns home from war, only to discover his wife thinks he's been back for years because another man has already claimed his place.Legoland celebrates Woodward's gift for clarity, wit and surprise: his lithe prose and willingness to ignore convention carrying us from comedy to tragedy and back again, sometimes in a single story; it confirms him as one of the most gifted and original writers of our time.

Legoland

Ever since Aldous Jones careened over the handlebars of his bicycle in 1955 and landed next to farmer Evan's field, it has become a tradition for him to take his family camping in Wales, believing that a certain symbiosis exists between their lives in their North London home and the Welsh village that they only ever see in August. Original.

The vulture, the presiding genius of Gerard Woodward’s collection, is at once sympathetic and awful, intimate and other. Woodward naturally positions himself at uncomfortable borders and thresholds, and in doing so alerts us to the flimsiness of the conceits of home, of family and human culture. Many poets have challenged our lazy habit of addressing nature though the pathetic fallacy; few have had the nerve to consciously embrace it as a subversive strategy, through which we can explore the strange intimacies we share with other life-forms. The Vulture shows insects and animals and plants invade, infect and fuse with us at every turn; elsewhere, the architecture of our lives, our houses, gardens, careers and bodies, are revealed as the provisional drafts they are. No contemporary poet unsettles like Woodward: he does so through no easy surrealism, but instead an extraordinary ability to render our home the alien planet it is, and give conscious voice and vivid shape to the terrible sense of precariousness that lies just below our waking state.

The Vulture

Sara Maitland

Ramsey Campbell

Christopher Priest

Hanif Kureishi

Nicholas Royle

Etgar Keret

Alison MacLeod

Frank Cottrell Boyce

Ian Duhig

Jane Rogers

A.S. Byatt

Adam Marek

Mathew Holness

** Winner of the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Anthology** In 1919 Sigmund Freud published an essay that delved deep into the tradition of horror writing and claimed to understand one of its darkest tricks. Like a mad scientist, he performed literary vivisection on a still-breathing body of work, exploring its inner anatomy, and pulling out mysterious organs for classification. His aim: to present to the world a complete theory of ‘das unheimliche’, the uncanny. In the spirit of this great experiment, 14 leading authors have here been challenged to write fresh fictional interpretations of what the uncanny might mean in the 21st century, to update Freud’s famous checklist of what gives us the creeps, and to give the hulking canon of uncanny fiction a shot in the arm, a shock to the neck-bolts... 'It’s not too great a stretch to see Comma as the literary equivalent of Factory Records.' - The Herald, 2 Dec. 'Delightful and disturbing' - The Independent on Sunday, 14 Dec. 'A masterclass in understated creepiness... a deliciously macabre collection that the old Austrian might well have enjoyed.' - Book of the Week, Time Out, 12 Jan. 'If we need the uncanny – and I suspect we do – then we also need it updating... laudable.' - Book of the Week, The Independent, 2 Jan. 'A bold idea.' - The Guardian, 3 Jan.

The New Uncanny

Gerard Woodward’s poetry has long been admired for its sharp and unflinching eye, its fearless surrealism, its blacker-than-black humour, and its ability to find a little abyss in any detail, no matter how innocuous or domestic. Here, his considerations of trampolines, bird-tables and lightbulbs will leave the reader unable to regard those things in quite the same way again; they will also find science-fiction novels compressed to a few stanzas, strange potted biographies, and lists of edicts from long-dead tyrants. However, The Seacunny finds this inimitable voice extend itself in new and unexpected directions, with the poet turning to the natural world and to human relationships in ways that are affecting as they are surprising. This is a book of astonishing range, and declares a new lyric direction in Woodward’s poetry.

The Seacunny

There is no such thing as an ordinary life. But Kenneth Brill's is more extraordinary than most. By the time he is arrested for espionage towards the end of the Second World War he has an incredible story to tell. Under interrogation he describes his unusual childhood, shares the decadent details of his training as a painter at the prestigious Slade School of Art in the 1930s and explains just why he was so very friendly with the prostitutes of London's Soho underworld; he narrates his heroic actions as a camouflage officer before El Alamein, when he helped pull off one of the greatest acts of deception in the history of warfare, and accounts for his part in a night-time break-in of the royal residence of Buckingham Palace. This is a life lived to the full, whether as son, friend, lover, teacher or pupil. The only question is: whose side is he really on? 'A huge, complex novel, at turns both blackly funny and bleakly moving, driven by truly original characters' Daily Mail 'Clever, subtle, and rewarding' Times Literary Supplement

Vanishing

Colette Jones has had drink problems in the past, but now it seems as though her whole family is in danger of turning to alcohol. Her oldest son has thrown away a promising musical career for a job behind the counter in a builders' merchants, and his drinking sprees with his brother-in-law Bill, a pseudo-Marxist supermarket butcher who seems to see alcohol as central to the proletarian revolution, have started to land him in trouble with the police. Meanwhile Colette's recently widowered older brother is following an equally self-destructive path, having knocked back an entire cellar of homemade wine, he's now on the gin, a bottle a day and counting. Who will be next? Her youngest son had decided to run away to sea, but when her own husband hits the bottle Colette realises she has to act. As the pressure builds on Colette to cope with these damaged people, her own weaknesses begin to emerge, and become crucial to the outcome of all their lives. By way of an odyssey through the pubs, parks and drying-out clinics of suburban North London, Gerard Woodward's richly woven second novel I'll Go To Bed At Noon charts in microscopic detail the continuing history of a troubled but unforgettable family (first encountered in August) as it lurches from farce to tragedy and back again, and from one end of the 1970's to the other, and at the same time presents an unflinching portrait of British society in the unstable years leading up to the Thatcher revolution.

I'll Go to Bed at Noon

Paul Morley

Anthony Wilson

Gwendoline Riley

David Constantine

Shelagh Delaney

Clare Pollard

Michael Bracewell

Tariq Mehmood

Michael Symmons Roberts

Amanda Dalton

Emma Unsworth

Tony Sides

Wayne Clews

Jeanie O'Hare

An Anthology

Comma

Most of these vivid and unsettling stories are rooted in apparently everyday lives and situations, but suddenly become surreal or disturbing - reading them feels sometimes as though you're walking along in the real world and suddenly step off an edge into a void, where rules of gravity and normality have disappeared but life carries on ... They're full of Woodward's trademark mix of humour, pathos, dysfunctional families and disappointed lives, as well as dazzling moments of illumination, perfect imagery, beautiful writing and intimations of mortality (in 'A Ford Mondeo' and 'Gardening'). But this time there's infidelity ('Pangea Ultima', 'Milk', 'Cleopatra', 'Firemen'), curdled sex ('Firemen' again, and 'Chicken Pox'), strange jobs in kitchens and sandwich bars which involve betrayal and revenge (as in 'Hygiene' or 'Strawberries'). And the title comes from 'Rape' where a caravan (a nice Fleetwood Marauder) seems to have been lifted from its regular berth at Glenmore Caravan Park in the middle of the night to land it and its occupants in a field in the middle of nowhere... which leads to unaccustomed and violent fantasies.

Caravan Thieves

Paul Theroux

Mark Haddon

Saleem Haddad

Margaret Drabble

Lara Williams

Sarah Schofield

Alan Beard

Gaia Holmes

Bernardine Bishop

Christine Poulson

Matthew Holness

Lucie McKnight Hardy

Mike Nelson

Meave Haughey

Karen Featherstone

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.

Tales of Modern Unease

The New Abject

"Most of these vivid and unsettling stories are rooted in apparently everyday lives and situations, but suddenly become surreal or disturbing reading them feels sometimes as though you re walking along in the real world and suddenly step off an edge into a void, where rules of gravity and normality have disappeared but life carries on They re full of Woodward's trademark mix of humour, pathos, dysfunctional families and disappointed lives, as well as dazzling moments of illumination, perfect imagery, beautiful writing and intimations of mortality (in A Ford Mondeo and 'Gardening'). But this time there s infidelity ( Pangea Ultima, Milk, Cleopatra, Firemen ), curdled sex ( Firemen again, and 'Chicken Pox ), strange jobs in kitchens and sandwich bars which involve betrayal and revenge (as in Hygiene or Strawberries ). And the title comes from Rape where a caravan (a nice Fleetwood Marauder) seems to have been lifted from its regular berth at Glenmore Caravan Park in the middle of the night to land it and its occupants in a field in the middle of nowhere which leads to unaccustomed and violent fantasies."

A stunning new collection of stories from the Man Booker Prize and Whitbread Prize shortlisted author. Many of Legoland's stories begin with the seemingly every day, only for a turn of events to land them in an unsettling place where life's normal rules no longer apply. Whether he's writing about a child’s birthday party or the invasion of an unnamed country each story is full of Woodward's blacker-than-black humour, fearless surrealism, and poetic phrasing. Included here is his brilliant story 'The Family Whistle', shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. Legoland celebrates Woodward's trademark gift for wit and surprise: his lithe prose carrying us from comedy to tragedy and back again within a single tale. It confirms him as one of the most gifted and original writers of our time. ‘Gerard Woodward falls squarely between the comic lunacy of American short-form virtuoso George Saunders and the everyday rhapsodies of Raymond Carver’ Time Out

'Hugely enjoyable' John Boyne, author of The Heart's Invisible Furies Arnold Proctor’s quiet life is thrown off balance when he falls obsessively in love with Vera, a religious woman and one of his wife’s friends. Vera seems untroubled by her wrongdoing, yet faithless Arnold is wracked with guilt. He has never believed in God, but now he wonders if he truly believes in anything at all? Polly makes handcrafted paper, and even though the age of paper is dead, she runs a successful shop selling her exquisite products. Polly is secure and happy in her life, until the day her husband Arnold makes a very uncharacteristic declaration. Gerard Woodward's The Paper Lovers is a devastating story of sexual, religious and artistic obsession. It is about love and betrayal, and what becomes of us after our greatest certainties have been shattered.

The Paper Lovers

‘Woodward’s study of the ways in which we consume ourselves and those we love is surprising – and surprisingly charming – darkly witty and altogether brilliant’ Easy Living The English are an unusual bunch: quirky and eccentric, often reserved and reticent, but always strong and resilient. Tory Pace, the heroine of this beautifully written and hilarious black comedy, is all of these things. Typically, she’s trying to make the best of life in a difficult time: struggling, as only a mother can, to sustain her family in a land starved of nourishment. But like so many triumphs over adversity, her survival comes with a heavy price. Beginning shortly after the outbreak of war and continuing into the deftly drawn austerity years that followed, Woodward offers a generous family saga. Equally memorable for poignant moments of sadness, comic tableau, witty observations and unforgettable characters, Nourishment is a novel like no other – every bit as unique and charming as an English family, in fact.

Gerard Woodward

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