A collection of specially commissioned short stories mapping the contemporary urban environment. The city is at once strange and familiar in these stories. Friendships break up or never quite begin across dark, decaying bars; lives are relived on home video, deaths pawed over in a crime photographer's developing fluid. One woman's paranoia about being mugged or burgled leads to her questioning her own sanity; another, driving home late one night, wonders how the events in her life have led inexorably to this moment. Real or surreal, despairing or defiant, these stories prove that far from being a genre of offcuts and unfinished ideas, the short story is very much alive and well in Britain. Featuring Michael Bracewell, Shelagh Delaney, David Constantine, Amanda Dalton, Paul Morley, Clare Pollard, Gwendoline Riley, Anthony Wilson, Michael Symmons Roberts, Gerard Woodward, Tariq Mehmood, Emma Unsworth, Tony Sides, Wayne Clews and Jeanie O'Hare.