{"title":"Adam Marek","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the darkly comic and surreal short stories of Adam Marek. Perfect for fans of Roald Dahl and David Sedaris, explore his inventive tales where the ordinary meets the absurd.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"stone-thrower-book-adam-marek-9781905583508","title":"The Stone Thrower","description":"This is the much-anticipated second collection of short stories by the award-winning author of 'Instruction Manual for Swallowing'.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49534579573009,"sku":"GOR005877132","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49637948260625,"sku":"GOR005098660","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50697724559633,"sku":"NGR9781905583508","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1905583508.jpg?v=1751456877"},{"product_id":"instruction-manual-for-swallowing-book-adam-marek-9781905583041","title":"Instruction Manual for Swallowing","description":"An engaging new voice in absurdist fiction A new North American edition of an acclaimed short story collection, Instruction Manual for Swallowing explores what happens when ordinary people collide with bizarre, fantastical situations. 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Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Adam Marek' s third collection: an almanac of the absurd, a handbook to the hardware problems of being human. From driverless bodies, to life-coaching AIs, to sleep research on primates, to the effects of time dilation on married life... these stories explore the unlikeliest of possibilities the future may hold for us, as a race, but at their heart is a paradox: what happens when the seemingly limitless potential of human ability runs up against the insurmountable inadequacies of basic human psychology? Sons never forgive their fathers. Superheroes are brought low by simple performance anxiety. Billionaire space industrialists are exposed by their bad parenting skills. 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Whether in the creation myths of evolution or the Big Bang, or in the eureka moments of science history, narrative just as much as metaphor is a key tool in the scientist s surprisingly literary toolkit. Perhaps the most interesting use of story is the thought experiment, the intuition pump, that draws on the most instinctive parts of the imagination to crack otherwise perplexing problems. From Newton s Bucket and Maxwell s Demon to Einstein s Lift and Schrodinger s Cat, all are examples of fiction being used at the highest level, not just to explain but to deduce and to prove. In this unique anthology, authors including Hassan Blasim, Lucy Caldwell, Julian Gough, Simon Ings, Sara Maitland, Adam Marek, Sean O Brien, and Katherine Orr have collaborated with leading scientists to bounce literary, human narratives against purely theoretical ones, alloying together real stories with abstract ones to produce truly extraordinary results.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49626606960913,"sku":"GOR008972042","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1905583605.jpg?v=1751434769"},{"product_id":"instruction-manual-for-swallowing-book-adam-marek-9781770410800","title":"Instruction Manual for Swallowing","description":"An engaging new voice in absurdist fiction A new North American edition of an acclaimed short story collection, Instruction Manual for Swallowing explores what happens when ordinary people collide with bizarre, fantastical situations. 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At the core of Adam Marek's much-anticipated second short story collection is a single, unifying theme: a parent's instinct to protect a particularly vulnerable child. Whether set amid unnerving visions of the near-future or grounded in the domestic here-and-now, these stories demonstrate that, sometimes, only outright surrealism can do justice to the merciless strangeness of reality, that only the fantastically illogical can steel us against what ordinary life threatens. 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