Peninsula Press Ltd

'I have never told anyone about this before. There is no way to prove that it happened, but why would I lie?' The narrator of Attention-Seeking Behaviour thinks you should know about the body she found in the park. She thinks you should know about her sex life, which is fulfilling and systematic. She thinks you should know that she is a writer, that she is 'complex, creative and nasty'. But above all, she thinks you should know that she is a compulsive liar. Trying to break this habit for the sake of Normal Ben, an honest and uncomplicated man, she attempts a sincere reckoning with her long history of deception, its psychological roots and the terrible cost it has exacted on her relationships. But can we believe a word she say? unny, sexy, and politically astute, Attention-Seeking Behaviour is at once a personal confessional and a critical history of lie detection methods. Blending fiction and non-fiction - memoir, novel and essay - it wields confession shamelessly while positively embracing the proximity of literature and lying.

Kieran and Harlow's best friend Annie disappeared a year ago. And now, so have the ghosts. After being reunited at Annie's memorial, Kieran and Harlow begin separate searches for their lost friend, all while trying to repair their friendship. Harlow, recently retired from the CGI company she helped found, discovers fragments of the dead - faces, gestures, glances - in AI generated videos; meanwhile Kieran, aimless and isolated, stumbles into an occult community of those dedicated to finding the missing ghosts. The friends' journeys will lead them through a world at once recognisable and strangely removed. A subterranean world of endless tunnels filled with ominous arrangements of consumer goods; a world of seances where attendees are haunted by the empty spaces where ghosts used to be. As Harlow and Kieran are drawn deeper into the circumstances behind Annie's - and the ghosts' - disappearance, a terrifying, singular pattern breaks the surface. No Ghosts is a startling debut which plumbs the undercurrents of feeling that pool beneath our use of emergent technologies, to ask what new forms haunting might take. Told with a sinister precision, it dramatizes the abstraction and unreality that increasingly define our everyday lives, and marks the arrival of a major new literary novelist.

‘On 20 December 2015 I became a mother and I went mad.’On a single day, Mar García Puig gives birth to twins and becomes elected to the Spanish Parliament as a member of the insurgent left-wing party Podemos. What might have been the best day of her life becomes the start of a terrifying ordeal; García Puig’s grip on reality begins to slip as she grapples with uncertainty, the weight of expectation, and misogyny in both of her new roles. In defiance of a culture that tells her the problem lies within, García Puig chooses to look outwards, examining the imbrication of madness and motherhood across centuries of science, myth, and politics while dissecting the ways in which women have been pathologized and banished from public life. At once intimate and epic, The History of the Vertebrate is a searing account of postpartum madness. Moving between memory, culture, and the history of medicine, García Puig transforms her experience into a story about the countless women who have felt that sanity was leaving them, and about the patriarchal forces that have silenced them.

In Bad Language, So Mayer blends memoir and manifesto as they explore the politics of speech, while looking at how language has been used – and abused – in their own life. What is the relationship between language and sexual violence? And how can we ‘make ourselves up’ in language when words themselves are encoded by a dominant culture that insists we see ourselves as powerless listeners rather than active speakers? Examining the semantic traps of their multi-lingual childhood – and taking in texts from the Torah to Grimms’ Fairytales, from protest bust cards to the works of Ursula K. Le Guin – Mayer asks who gets to speak, and who is forced into silence. Bad Language calls out the harm that words can do, while searching for crafty ways through which we can collectively reclaim language for protest and pleasure.

From award-winning writer Sarah Schulman, a longtime activist and critic of the Israeli war on Gaza, comes a brilliant examination of the misunderstood concept of solidarity which seeks to provide a new vision of what it means, and why it matters. In this nuanced analysis, Schulman challenges the traditional notion of solidarity as a simple union of equals, arguing that in today's world of globalized power structures, true solidarity requires the collaboration of bystanders and conflicted perpetrators with the excluded and oppressed. Schulman examines a range of case studies, from the fight for abortion rights in post-Franco Spain, to NYC's AIDS activism in the 1990s, to the current wave of protest movements against Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people, and her own experience growing up as a queer female artist in male dominated culture industries. Reckoning with the successes and failures of these movements, she argues that action always comes at a cost, despite not always being effective. But without solidarity we are stuck with the status quo, and we lose any hope of progressive change. By turns challenging, inspiring, pragmatic, and poetic, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity provides a much-needed path for how we can work together towards justice now and for the future.

Over the last four decades, Lynne Tillman has established herself as one of America''s most audacious writers, a tireless innovator whose shorter works have reimagined the story form. Thrilled to Death collects a bold, playful, and eclectic ensemble of Tillman''s fictions. By turns outrageous and melancholy, meditative and abrupt, these stories are animated by deliciously paradoxical characters who are imbued with intelligence and ambivalence. Curated by the author, this definitive collection will surprise and delight established fans and new readers alike.

Over the past decade, we have begun to talk more openly about the widespread harm inflicted by men on women. But little has been said about the fact that many of these men are also fathers. In Daddy Issues Katherine Angel draws on thinkers and writers from D. W. Winnicott to Valerie Solanas, from Virginia Woolf to Alison Bechdel, as she examines the place of fathers in contemporary culture. She tracks how the relationship between fathers and daughters is so often presented as a twisted romance, with the burden falling always on the daughter. Bold, challenging and nuanced, Daddy Issues asks how the mixture of love and hatred we feel towards our fathers can be turned into a relationship that is generative rather than destructive. If we are to effectively dismantle patriarchy, it is vital that fathers are kept on the hook.

Seeking release from their small-town existence, two teenagers drive north on a vaguely plotted road trip. Adam and Teddy hope to leave boyhood behind. But they carry with them all the upsets and resentments they have accrued in their unhappy lives to date. As the pair''s journey progresses, the mood fluctuates as each of them sets out to prove himself. The dynamics of their friendship begin to unravel, culminating in an act of devastating - and all too familiar - violence. In taut and stylish prose, The Passenger Seat examines how men learn and perform masculinity. Rejecting easy answers, it keeps our eyes trained on the vanishing point where vulnerability edges into violence, alienation into aggression.

A few moments after birth we begin to use our lungs for the first time. From then on, we must continue breathing for as long as we are alive. And although this mostly happens unconsciously, in a society plagued by anxiety, climate change, environmental racism, and illness, there are more and more instances that ''teach us about the privilege that is breathing.'' Why do we so easily forget the air that we breathe in common? What does it mean to breathe when the environment that sustains life now threatens it? And how can life continue to flourish under conditions that are increasingly toxic? To approach these questions, Jamieson Webster draws on psychoanalytic theory and reflects on her own experiences as an asthmatic teenager, a deep-sea diver, a palliative psychologist during covid, a psychoanalyst attentive to the somatic, and a new mother. The result is a compassionate and timely exploration of air and breathing as a way to undo the pervasive myth of the individual by considering our dependence on invisible systems, on one another, and the way we have violently neglected this important aspect of life.

Following the death of her mother, twenty-two-year-old Anastasia King leaves Paris to return to Dublin. In the time that she has been away, her estranged father has died. On arriving to her family home, Anastasia is met by her paternal grandmother, who, filled with bitterness and spite, has determined never to forgive Anastasia for fleeing with her mother to Paris. As her days fill up with little humiliations, it becomes clear that, while Anastasia thinks she has come home to stay, for the vengeful Mrs King she is an unwelcome visitor. Written while Brennan was still in her twenties, this novella is a masterpiece of compression, a terse and haunting account of the personal and political factors that impinge on a young woman''s freedom. Presented here with a new introduction by Lynne Tillman, The Visitor seals Maeve Brennan''s reputation as one of the twentieth century''s finest writers, and one of the most unflinching documentarians of the human heart.