A. J. Ashworth, "Maybe the Birds"

A. ‎J. Ashworth is the author of the short story collection Somewhere Else, or Even Here, which won The Scott Prize and was shortlisted in the Edge Hill Prize. The Times Literary Supplement said that her work "displays impressive versatility" and that her stories "do not progress so much as accrue, collecting incidental detail that enriches the scenarios without pointing towards their resolution." She is the editor of Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës, which was her own idea to raise funds for The Brontë Birthplace Trust. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Edge Hill University and works as an associate editor of the journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. Maybe the Birds is her second collection and features "Leather" which was selected for Best British Short Stories.

About Maybe the Birds, by A. J. Ashworth
After the apocalypse destroys most life on Earth, a woman makes artificial bird voiceboxes to try to keep birdsong alive. A young female vampire uses her knowledge of mirrors to save her village from the man who turned her. A woman haunted by her past feels that the robins she has always loved are no longer her friends. These fourteen stories, largely speculative in nature, consider what happens when the world is no longer as it used to be – whether in the postapocalyptic future, the paleolithic past or the dark north of the present. The collection is interested in love and loss, families and foes, as well as moments of disconnection and connection. All are interested in what it means to be alive in very difficult times.

You can read more about Maybe the Birds on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From Maybe the Birds

From the title story "Maybe the Birds"

I watch the dog. The dog watches something through the patio doors to the backyard. Every now and then his head tilts to one side in the way it does when I talk to him or sing to him. Although there is no sound that would make him do that now. Not that I can make out anyway. But dogs have better hearing, don’t they? They hear things no human ear is capable of detecting.

Like dog whistles.

The low growl of thunder from five miles away.

A million voices screaming from the other side of the world.

Maybe the birds are singing but I just can’t hear them. Maybe there is someone out there shuffling about. Maybe, maybe ... But this is all just wishful thinking – the birds, someone being out there. It’s the way your mind gets in the quiet. He’s probably just got his eyes on all the brown leaves in the yard and wondering why they’re there. "Why all these brown leaves in the spring, Ma?" I imagine him asking in the human voice I have given to him. But I haven’t got any answers. None that he would understand anyway. And so I keep quiet, and just carry on watching as he tilts his head the other way. Not once looking at me. Eyes full on whatever has got his attention through the grey dust coating the glass on the patio door. The little dots of his pupils as black as the night used to be.

Jonathan Taylor, "A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons"

The only remaining photo of Jonathan Taylor's short-lived career in ballet, c. 1977

Jonathan Taylor is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, where he directs the MA in Creative Writing. His books include the novels Melissa (Salt, 2015) and Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012), the short story collection Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023), and the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007). His new memoir is A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024). Originally from Stoke-on-Trent, he now lives in Leicestershire with his wife, the poet Maria Taylor, and their twin daughters, Miranda and Rosalind. His website is here. 

 

About A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons
What does it mean to be a bully? What does it feel like to be bullied—to be a victim, a pariah, a scapegoat? What are the techniques, patterns, and languages of bullying?

Intermingling memoir with literary criticism, philosophy, and sociology, A Physical Education attempts to answer these questions. A highly original exploration of the uses and abuses of power in the education system, it examines how bullying and discipline function, how they differ from each other, and how they all too often overlap.  

Taylor interweaves his own experiences with reflections on well-known literary representations of bullying and school discipline, alongside sociological, psychological, and philosophical theories of power. He discusses the transition from corporal punishment to psychological forms of discipline that took place in the UK in the 1980s, and he also investigates the divergences and convergences of physical, psychological, and linguistic bullying. 

Above all, A Physical Education sets out to understand bullying and discipline from an experiential perspective: what these things feel like from "within," rather than "above," for all concerned. There are horrors, tragedies, and cyclical traumas, certainly—but there are also absurdities, contradictions, grotesque comedies. Sometimes, beneath the Gradgrindian tyranny, there is trickery, laughter. And sometimes there are chinks in The Wall, through which other possible worlds might be glimpsed.

You can read excerpts from one of the chapters from the book on The Times Higher here. You can read further details about the book on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read the opening of the first chapter. 

Jonathan at school, c.1982

From A Physical Education, by Jonathan Taylor

P.E.

It’s January 1985. I’m eleven. We’re lined up on the school football pitch, ankle-deep in slushy brown snow. It’s -2 degrees and raining ice, blowing across our faces in gusts like acid – which may be literally true, given the air pollution in ’80s Stoke. We’re shivering in shorts, white t-shirts, itchy ribbed socks and football boots with studs on. I’ve got plastic studs on my boots, but others like Danny Beaker – who, already at 5’11, is a good foot taller than me – have got metal spikes. There are a couple of punctures in the tops of my boots from previous games, when Danny stamped on them. 

The wet is seeping into my socks through the holes, while the sleet slanting from the sky is somehow creeping up my shorts, in a cruel contradiction of Newtonian physics. Every other part of my body is already soaking, and gradually freezing over. I glance around. The other boys are the same, wet through, hands in armpits, stamping up and down in vain effort to keep warm, their smoky breaths mingling above their heads like a big speech bubble: Get on with it, sir. 

Sir gets on with it, inevitably choosing the giant Danny Beaker as captain of one team, a second Godzilla-like boy as captain of the other. They nominate who they want on their teams in turn. I’m usually last, after ‘Pi’ the school Tory (one and only), who looks like his parents mistook a Stoke comprehensive for Marlborough, and my friend Steed, who pretends to have asthma to get out of running. In team sports, the three of us are the crumbs at the bottom of a crisp packet, the broken bits of Rich Tea in a biscuit barrel. 

Steed’s on Danny Beaker’s team, so Godzilla II gets the final crumb that is myself. He doesn’t even bother to call my name, merely rolls his eyes and turns away. He slouches over to the centre spot – or, rather, the hole in the slushy snow Sir has dug with his heels, to mark the centre spot – and waits for Sir to blow the whistle. Godzilla II’s holding his balls, jiggling on the spot, his vaporous speech bubble presumably saying: Get on with it, sir, before these freeze off.

Sir’s rather allegorical name is Mr Yorwin. He’s dressed in a brown sheepskin knee-length coat, woolly tracksuit bottoms, and is smoking a cigarette. The smouldering cigarette end is the one bit of colour in the whole landscape. “Taylor,” he grunts out of the side of his mouth, “get your arse in gear.” The other boys snigger. 

I jog over to him: “Sir, please, can’t we wear …?” But he cuts me off. 

“Don’t be a poof, Taylor. You don’t need yer tracksuits. You’ll warm up on the pitch if you play proper.”

“But, sir …”

“Shurrup. Get over there. You’re defence.”

“Some defence,” mutters Godzilla II from a distance.

Mr Yorwin blows his whistle. Danny Beaker is immediately thundering down the pitch towards me like a bull ... 

Abi Curtis, "The Headland"

 

Abi Curtis is Professor of Creative Writing at York St John University. She is the author of two poetry collections, Unexpected Weather (Salt, 2009) and The Glass Delusion (Salt, 2013) and a climate change novel Water & Glass (Cloud Lodge, 2017). She also edited Blood & Cord: Writers on Early Parenthood (Emma Press, 2023) and is currently working on a co-authored guide to Speculative Fiction. She has eclectic interests and has written and presented on subjects from motherhood to bees; ancient churches to the uncanny; squid to elegy and enjoys collaborating with artists and musicians. 

About The Headland
A novel about the dark gifts of grief, what it means to belong, and the possibility that time and space may not be what we think they are.

It is the morning following a devastating hurricane on England's south coast, and local painter Dolores is walking the shingle beach of the Headland. She spots something unusual lurking in a piece of driftwood - a color, a creature, perhaps something fostered by the twin forces of storm and atomic fallout. It's all anyone has been talking about, after all, just months after Chernobyl and in the shadow of the local nuclear power station.

Decades later, her son Morgan returns to the Headland to arrange for Dolores' funeral. The power station is about to be decommissioned, and the bleak landscape is best known now as a landing point for desperate immigrants from across the Channel. Morgan's girlfriend is pregnant - an unexpected revelation that he is not at all sure about - and he is especially keen to discover what he can from his mother's unusual cottage, especially about his father, whom he has never known. He uncovers the diary his mother wrote following the hurricane. It tells a story about Dolores and the strange being she discovers on the beach - a story which is both enthralling and heartrending. As he reads the journal, Morgan's own experiences of the Headland become increasingly inexplicable. The journal challenges Morgan's ideas about love and grief, parenthood and belonging, and the very fabric of time. As he unravels the mysteries of his mother's past, he must come to terms with his own origins and face the growing violence from those who would threaten the peace of the Headland.

You can read more about The Headland on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From The Headland, by Abi Curtis
I went to the library yesterday after work, looking for a better encyclopaedia than the old one I have here, to try to work out if there are any creatures like her anywhere. When I looked, I saw that Violet has the characteristics of a Humboldt squid, with its ability to change colour, flashing brightly in the sea depending on its moods. But then, she also has the proboscis of a moth, who uses it to taste the air. But she doesn’t have wings. The golden mole has iridescent fur, but it is not invisible. There are creatures that like very hot conditions, like camels, or weird bacteria called water bears, which live off thermal vents. These can also revert to a state of agelessness and defy the passage of time. Then, I looked at plant life. The violet flower: so many different species, some thriving where there is barely any soil. Her creeping legs which shift in and away from my perception as they move belong to nothing that I can identify. Only deep-sea creatures seem to possess this quality of transparency, the filaments of their nervous systems visible beneath their jelly-like skin. But these would be like deflated balloons outside of the water, and Violet has thrived on land for weeks now. I looked at insects, mammals, birds, cephalopods. Octopuses and squids have limbs that can perceive independently. Bees are especially attuned to the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, which humans cannot see, and so attracted by white and purple flowers. They communicate by vibration and strong smell, and movement. The bookworm, which is really a beetle, eats mould, glue and the bindings of books, only incidentally devouring the paper. Moths do that too. Some butterflies like decaying matter and live near graves …

I made a list of notes like a student cramming for a weird exam. Then, I looked at another section of the library. Next to the Science Fiction were titles like Top Secret and The Many Types of Luminous Sky Phenomena, Alien Life, and We are not Alone: Alien Abduction Cases. Some had facsimile documents from places like the FBI with chunks redacted in black ink, alien autopsy photos and pilot accounts of disc- or orb-like vessels. Sketches from abduction ‘victims’ of thin grey men with big black screen eyes. If Violet is not of this world, she is not this kind of alien.

Jordan Crandall, "Autodrive"

 

Jordan Crandall is Professor of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego. He is the author of five books, including Drive, an anthology of his artworks, media installations, and theoretical writings published by Neue Galerie Graz and ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. In 2011 he was the recipient of the Vilém Flusser Theory Award for outstanding research in media art and digital culture. Autodrive is his first work of fiction.

About Autodrive, by Jordan Crandall

Autodrive is a work of literary fiction that melds techno-scientific inquiry and storytelling, critical theory and comedy, speculative fiction and satire. It is a road novel of sorts, an odyssey along the highways at a time when a new form of superintelligence has emerged. This new form of artificial intelligence is not entirely distinct from the characters in the narrative — it is ingrained in the machines they already use, the vehicles they already take, the systems they are already part of, but cannot fully see. The human character who is typically at the center of the fictional world gives way to an eccentric cast of performers — an ensemble of people and machines.

You can see more information about Autodrive on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Autodrive

City Center West 

There was an accident at the construction site on the north side of the Crosstown. One of the excavation machines knocked a truck off the overpass. It created a huge bottleneck along the frontage road. We had to inch along in bumper to bumper traffic for nearly an hour. 

People were patient at first, but then a few of the passengers started complaining in a way that caused everyone else to start complaining. A strange phenomenon happens in situations like that, suddenly everyone unloads, it releases a feeling of anguish but also excitement. 

Everyone was speaking loudly in order to be heard above the noise. But it was hard to hear anything, you could only pick up bits and pieces of what people were saying. There was talk of accidents, anomalies, irrepressible crowds. A hearse chasing a group of tourists. A delivery truck menacing a passenger van. A parking lot brawl that got out of hand. 

A traveler in the adjoining seat started talking to me. I found it hard to engage with him because he was wearing one of those facepieces that hide your expression. The only part that moves is a mouthlike orifice, a slot over the mouth for eating. Sometimes it snaps open and shut and you expect a voice to come out, but the voice does not come from there, it comes from an embedded speaker that has no relation to the mouth. 

There is a much greater chance of misunderstanding if your face is hidden, I told him. It is better to have a transparent shield, like an astronaut. A bubble is better. 

He started telling me about a mysterious car that was trailing him. A Compiler-type model that did nothing but follow him around. It would pull up to the house and sit there. Park outside the office and wait. He said he could feel it out there waiting for him even if he could not see it—one of those things you just know, like when you can feel someone staring at you without having to turn around to look. 

I asked him if he had any idea of who might be in the car. 

He had the sense that there was no one operating the car. That it was self-determined in some other way. 

What way, I asked him. 

Like the cars in those old road movies, he said. The ones that had no drivers but were self-operated somehow—powered by an unknown force. Limousines and hearses, towncars and trucks that appeared out of nowhere and chased people. Plowed into traffic, mowed down pedestrians, bumped off policemen, slammed into cars. Messengers of catastrophe, he called them. Self-aware, self-willed, superintelligent machines ready to strike, turn on the people they were created to serve. 

A superintelligent machine would not act that way, I told him. It would be more like a conglomerate, more like a corporation than a vehicle. If you want to worry about a malevolent AI, that is what you should be concerned about. Not a machine that is out to get you, but an organization that is.