Influx Press

Berlin: long-celebrated as a city of artists and outcasts, but also a city of teachers and construction workers. A place of tourists and refugees, and the memories of those exiled and expelled. A city named after marshland; if you dig a hole, you'll soon hit sand.

Car parks: commonplace urban landscapes, little-explored and rarely featured in art and music, yet they shape the aesthetics of our towns and cities. Hotspots for crime, rage and sexual deviancy; a blind spot in which activities go unnoticed. Skateboarding, car stunts, drug dealing, dogging, murder.

"We architects must be idealists. We construct not just individual buildings, but whole cities. We plan cities, and in doing so, change lives."

Inspired by the surreal accounts of the explorer and 'man of a million lies' Marco Polo, Imaginary Cities charts the metropolis and the imagination, and the symbiosis therein. A work of creative nonfiction, the book roams through space, time and possibility, mapping cities of sound, melancholia and the afterlife, where time runs backwards or which float among the clouds. In doing so, Imaginary Cities seeks ...

One November morning, Tom Jeffreys set off from Euston Station with a gnarled old walking stick in his hand and an overloaded rucksack. His aim was to walk the 119 miles from London to Birmingham along the proposed route of HS2. Needless to say, he failed. Over the course of ten days of walking, Jeffreys meets conservationists and museum directors, ery farmers and suicidal retirees. From a rapidly changing...

Germany's Baltic coast. A place of escape, of carefree summer holidays, of spa towns and health retreats. A place where some of the darkest stories of 20th Century German history played out.

'The problems started the day we moved to Hastings...' When Gareth E. Rees moves to a dilapidated Victorian house in Hastings he begins to piece together an occult puzzle connecting Aleister Crowley, John Logie Baird and the Piltdown Man hoaxer. As freak storms and tidal surges ravage the coast, Rees is beset by memories of his best friend's tragic death in St Andrews twenty years earlier. Convinced that...

How the Light Gets In is the debut collection from award winning short story writer, Clare Sita Fisher. A book of very short stories that explores the spaces between light and dark and how we find our way from one to the other. From buffering Skype chats and the truth about beards, to fried chicken shops and the things smartphones make you less likely to do when alone in a public place, Fisher paints a comp...

HOLD TIGHT is a book about being black, British and born after 1980. It's also about Grime.Celebrating over fifty key songs that make up Grime's DNA, Jeffrey Boakye explores the meaning of the music and why it has such resonance in the UK. Boakye also examines the representation of masculinity in the music and the media that covers it.Both a loving critique of Grime and an investigation into life as a black...

Having spent three years in the early 1990s occupying properties and protesting in Claremont Road, east London, poet Paul Hawkins maps the run-off, rackets and resistance along the route of the proposed M11 Link Road. Using the voices of Dolly Watson, Old Mick and many others in avant-garde experimental text and lo-fi collage, he explores place, waste and dissent, and the stake the Thatcher/Major Tory gover...

AN UNRELIABLE GUIDE TO LONDON brings together twenty-six stories about the lesser known parts of a world renowned city. Stories that stretch the reader's definition of the truth. Stories that have you questioning whether reality, and fiction simultaneously. Stories that will tell you there are wind nymphs in North Clapham tube station, a horse sized swan at Brentford Ait, Sleeping Clinics in NW3 and celebr...

Isabelle is alone in Strasbourg. The day after her partner leaves to travel abroad, she receives news of her father's suicide, his body found hanging in a park back home in Crystal Palace. Isabelle misses her flight back to London and a new university job, opting to stay in her partner's empty flat over the winter.

London, a city of constant transition, transaction, translation. London does not exist; London is a language without a place and it is the aphasic city; it's the mother of all languages.