China Miéville

A contemporary fantasy set in present-day London finds people flocking to a British Museum exhibit of a giant squid that is stolen by magical criminals, a crime that propels young curator Billy into a supernatural underworld. By the Arthur C. Clarke- and Locus-winning author of Perdido Street Station.

An Anatomy

Kraken

"After his mother goes missing, a boy is left alone in a remote house on a hilltop with his increasingly deranged father. When an odd man knocks on his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation are over. But will this stranger at last trigger the doom the boy has feared or will he somehow save the boy from the worst?"--

A Novella

This Census-taker

A new cast of characters shares mythical adventures in the sprawling, phantasmagoric city of New Crobuzon.

Iron Council

When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad. Borlu must travel to a metropolis as strange as his own. It is a journey as psychic as it is physical.

The City & the City

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND THE GUARDIAN * The fiction of multiple award-winning author China Miéville is powered by intelligence and imagination. Like George Saunders, Karen Russell, and David Mitchell, he pulls from a variety of genres with equal facility, employing the fantastic not to escape from reality but instead to interrogate it in provocative, unexpected ways. London awakes one morning to find itself besieged by a sky full of floating icebergs. Destroyed oil rigs, mysteriously reborn, clamber from the sea and onto the land, driven by an obscure but violent purpose. An anatomy student cuts open a cadaver to discover impossibly intricate designs carved into a corpse's bones--designs clearly present from birth, bearing mute testimony to . . . what? Of such concepts and unforgettable images are made the twenty-eight stories in this collection--many published here for the first time. By turns speculative, satirical, and heart-wrenching, fresh in form and language, and featuring a cast of damaged yet hopeful seekers who come face-to-face with the deep weirdness of the world--and at times the deeper weirdness of themselves--Three Moments of an Explosion is a fitting showcase for one of literature's most original voices. Praise for Three Moments of an Explosion "Even when he is orbiting somewhere in a galaxy too far away for normal human comprehension, the genre-subverting English novelist China Miéville is dazzling. His latest collection of short stories, Three Moments of an Explosion, crowds virtuosity into every sentence. . . . There are things to admire in every story, even the ones you can't quite grasp. The book left me feeling unsettled, uneasy, nervous, and I think that is Mr. Miéville's point. He wants to draw attention to the scratching under the floorboards, the panic in our heads, the rebellion of nature and inanimate objects. As he says, 'These days there are so many odd and troubling noises in the city.'"--Sarah Lyall, The New York Times "You can't talk about Miéville without using the word 'brilliant.' . . . His wit dazzles, his humour is lively, and the pure vitality of his imagination is astonishing. . . . My favourite of all these tales is 'The Rules,' two and a half pages long. Read it. You won't regret it, or forget it."--Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian (U.K.) "Three Moments of an Explosion is a book filled with fabulous oddities."--Entertainment Weekly "Horror, noir, fantasy, politics, and poetry swirl into combinations as satisfying intellectually as they are emotionally. . . . Bradbury meets Borges, with Lovecraft gibbering tumultuously just out of hearing."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Miéville moves effortlessly among realism, fantasy, and surrealism in this dark, sometimes horrific short story collection. . . . His characters, whether ordinary witnesses to extraordinary events or lunatics operating out of inexplicable compulsions, are invariably well drawn and compelling. Above all, what the stories have in common is a sense that the world is not just strange, but stranger than we can ever really comprehend."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Stories

Three Moments of an Explosion

Weaving together the historical and the imagined, China Miéville's The Last Days of New Paris is a surreal and extraordinary work, from the author of The City & The City. 1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer and occult disciple Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including Surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world for ever. 1950. A lone Surrealist fighter, Thibaut, walks a new, hallucinogenic Paris, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts - and by the forces of Hell. To escape the city, Thibaut must join forces with Sam, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins, and make common cause with a powerful, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse. But Sam is being hunted. And new secrets will emerge that will test all their loyalties - to each other, to Paris old and new, and to reality itself.

The Last Days of New Paris

Something is stirring in London's dark, stamping out its territory in brickdust and blood. Something has murdered Saul Garamond's father, and left Saul to pay for the crime. But a shadow from the urban waste breaks into Saul's prison cell and leads him to freedom. A shadow called King Rat, who reveals Saul's royal heritage, a heritage that opens a new world to Saul, the world below London's streets--a heritage that also drags Saul into King Rat's plan for revenge against his ancient enemy,. With drum 'n' bass pounding the backstreets, Saul must confront the forces that would use him, the forces that would destroy him, and the forces that shape his own bizarre identity. China Mieville's King Rat was nominated for both the International Horror Guild and Bram Stoker Awards for best first novel.

King Rat

The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the centre of its own bewildering world. Humans and mutants and arcane races throng the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the rivers are sluggish with unnatural effluent, and factories and foundries pound into the night. For more than a thousand years, the parliament and its brutal militia have ruled over a vast array of workers and artists, spies, magicians, junkies and whores. Now a stranger has come, with a pocketful of gold and an impossible demand, and inadvertently something unthinkable is released. Soon the city is gripped by an alien terror - and the fate of millions depends on a clutch of outcasts on the run from lawmakers and crime-lords alike. The urban nightscape becomes a hunting ground as battles rage in the shadows of bizarre buildings. And a reckoning is due at the city's heart, in the vast edifice of Perdido Street Station. It is too late to escape. 'A work of exhaustive inventiveness . . . superlative fantasy' Time Out 'A well-written, authentically engrossing adventure story, exuberantly full of hocus-pocus . . . Miéville does not disappoint' Daily Telegraph

Perdido Street Station

Looking for Jake and Other Stories

Winner of the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, China Miéville's astonishing Embassytown is an intelligent and immersive exploration of language in an alien world. Embassytown: a city of contradictions on the outskirts of the universe. Avice is an immerser, a traveller on the immer, the sea of space and time below the everyday, now returned to her birth planet. Here on Arieka, humans are not the only intelligent life, and Avice has a rare bond with the natives, the enigmatic Hosts - who cannot lie. Only a tiny cadre of unique human Ambassadors can speak Language, and connect the two communities. But an unimaginable new arrival has come to Embassytown. And when this Ambassador speaks, everything changes. Catastrophe looms. Avice knows the only hope is for her to speak directly to the alien Hosts. And that is impossible.

Embassytown

"Fantasy and science fiction writer China Miéville has long been inspired by the ideals of the Russian Revolution and here, on the centenary of the revolution, he provides his own ... take on its history. In February 1917 ... Russia was still an autocratic monarchy: nine months later, it became the first socialist state in world history ... This is the story of the extraordinary months between those upheavals, in February and October, of the forces and individuals who made 1917 so epochal a year"--

The Story of the Russian Revolution

October

Richard Seymour

Jamie Allinson

Rosie Warren

Facing irreversible climate change, the planet is en route to apocalypse To understand the scale of what faces us and how it ramifies through every corner of our lives is to marvel at our inaction. Why aren't we holding emergency meetings in every city, town and village every week? What is to be done to create a planet where a communist horizon offers a new dawn to replace our planetary twilight? What does it mean to be a communist after we have hit a climate tipping point? The Tragedy of the Worker is a brilliant, stringently argued pamphlet reflecting on capitalism's death drive, the left's complicated entanglements with fossil fuels, and the rising tide of fascism. In response, the authors propose Salvage Communism, a programme of restoration and reparation that must precede any luxury communism. They set out a new way to think about the Anthropocene. The Tragedy of the Worker demands an alternative future--the Proletarocene--one capable of repairing the ravages of capitalism and restoring the world.

Towards the Proletarocene

The Tragedy of the Worker

The iron wheel began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster. The room grew darker. As the light lessened, so did the sound. Deeba and Zanna stared at each other in wonder. The noise of the cars and vans and motorbikes outside grew tinny . . . The wheel turned off all the cars and turned off all the lamps. It was turning off London. Zanna and Deeba are two girls leading ordinary lives, until they stumble into the world of UnLondon, an urban Wonderland where all the lost and broken things of London end up . . . and some of its lost and broken people too. Here discarded umbrellas stalk with spidery menace, carnivorous giraffes roam the streets, and a jungle sprawls beyond the door of an ordinary house. UnLondon is under siege by the sinister Smog and its stink-junkie slaves; it is a city awaiting its hero. Guided by a magic book that can’t quite get its facts straight, and pursued by Hemi the half-ghost boy, the girls set out to stop the poisonous cloud before it burns everything in its path. They are joined in their quest by a motley band of UnLondon locals, including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas, Obaday Fing, a couturier whose head is an enormous pincushion, and an empty milk carton called Curdle. Winner of the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book, China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun is an extraordinary vivid creation;is populated by astonishing frights and delights that will thrill the imagination.

Un Lun Dun

Mateus Santolouco

Out-of-work, out-of-shape Nelson Jent discovers a mysterious payphone that grants him the powers of seemingly random superheroes when he dials for help, leaving Nelson to deal with the repercussions of being a superhero.

Into You

Dial H.

Zwei Städte - geeint und doch entzweit. Die Bewohner werden erzogen, einander nicht zu sehen. Das unerlaubte Betreten der jeweils andere Stadt zieht schwerste Strafen nach sich. Ein ganz alltägliches Szenario für Kommissar Borlú. Eines Tages wird in Borlús Stadt eine Frauenleiche gefunden. Der Mord stellt ihn vor ein Rätsel. Denn die Tote hätte niemals in seiner Stadt auftauchen dürfen. Offenbar hat der Mörder gegen die Regeln verstossen: Er hat die Leiche von der einen Stadt in die andere geschafft, ohne Alarm auszulösen. Will Borlú den Fall lösen, bleibt ihm nur ein einziger Weg: Er muss allein in die verbotene Zwillingsstadt, um das Ungesehene sichtbar zu machen.

Roman

Die Stadt & die Stadt

Mieville critically examines existing theories of international law and offers a compelling alternative Marxist view.

A Marxist Theory of International Law

Between Equal Rights

A colossal fantasy of incredible diversity and spellbinding imagination. A human cargo bound for servitude in exile . . . A pirate city hauled across the oceans . . . A hidden miracle about be revealed . . . These are the ingredients of an astonishing story. It is the story of a prisoner's journey. Of the search for the island of a forgotten people, for the most astonishing beast in the seas, and ultimately for a fabled place - a massive wound in reality, a source of unthinkable power and danger.

The Scar

Susan Abulhawa

Henning Mankell

Chinua Achebe

Geoff Dyer

Michael Ondaatje

Linda Spalding

Adam Foulds

Pankaj Mishra

Claire Messud

Kamila Shamsie

Teju Cole

Deborah Moggach

Michael Palin

J.M. Coetzee

Raja Shehadeh

Rachel Holmes

Sabrina Mahfouz

William Sutcliffe

Mohammed Hanif

Molly Crabapple

Alice Walker

Mahmoud Darwish

Ed Pavlic

Gillian Slovo

Ru Freeman

Najwan Darwish

Jeremy Harding

Yasmin El-Rifae

Suheir Hammad

Mercedes Kemp

John Horner

Suad Amiry

Bridget Keenan

Jehan Bseiso

Atef Abu Saif

Omar El-Khairy

Selma Dabbagh

Remi Kanazi

Muiz,

Ghada Karmi

Maath Musleh

Nancy Kricorian

Nathalie Handal

Victoria Brittain

Jamal Mahjoub

Writers from Alice Walker to Michael Ondaatje to Claire Messud share their thoughts on one of the most vital gatherings of writers and readers in the world. The Palestine Festival of Literature was established in 2008 by authors Ahdaf Soueif, Brigid Keenan, Victoria Brittain and Omar Robert Hamilton. Bringing writers to Palestine from all corners of the globe, it aimed to break the cultural siege imposed by the Israeli military occupation, to strengthen artistic links with the rest of the world, and to reaffirm, in the words of Edward Said, "the power of culture over the culture of power." Celebrating the tenth anniversary of PalFest, This Is Not a Border is a collection of essays, poems, and sketches from some of the world's most distinguished artists, responding to their experiences at this unique festival. Both heartbreaking and hopeful, their gathered work is a testament to the power of literature to promote solidarity and hope in the most desperate of situations. Contributing authors include J. M. Coetzee, China Miéville, Alice Walker, Geoff Dyer, Claire Messud, Henning Mankell, Michael Ondaatje, Kamila Shamsie, Michael Palin, Deborah Moggach, Mohammed Hanif, Gillian Slovo, Adam Foulds, Susan Abulhawa, Ahdaf Soueif, Jeremy Harding, Brigid Keenan, Rachel Holmes, Suad Amiry, Gary Younge, Jamal Mahjoub, Molly Crabapple, Najwan Darwish, Nathalie Handal, Omar Robert Hamilton, Pankaj Mishra, Raja Shehadeh, Selma Dabbagh, William Sutcliffe, Atef Abu Saif, Yasmin El-Rifae, Sabrina Mahfouz, Alaa Abd El Fattah, Mercedes Kemp, Ru Freeman.

Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

This Is Not A Border

Step into a London ravaged by unearthly creatures at once utterly alien and chillingly familiar. This collection contains thirteen short stories, of visionary cityscapes and urban paranoia, ghosts, monsters and impossible diseases.

China Miéville

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