Michael Rosen

In Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, Ankhi Mukherjee offers a magisterial work of literary and cultural criticism which examines the relationship between global cities, poverty, and psychoanalysis. Spanning three continents, this hugely ambitious book reads fictional representations of poverty with each city's psychoanalytic and psychiatric culture, particularly as that culture is fostered by state policies toward the welfare needs of impoverished populations. It explores the causal relationship between precarity and mental health through clinical case studies, the product of extensive collaborations and knowledge-sharing with community psychotherapeutic initiatives in six global cities. These are layered with twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of world literature that explore issues of identity, illness, and death at the intersections of class, race, globalisation, and migrancy. In Unseen City, Mukherjee argues that a humanistic and imaginative engagement with the psychic lives of the dispossessed is key to an adapted psychoanalysis for the poor, and that seeking equity of the unconscious is key to poverty alleviation.

This volume contains sixteen examples of the English short story at its best: immediately captivating and hugely entertaining. Some stories are classics, such as James Joyce's "The Dead"; others - like 'Mr Loveday's "Little Outing" by Evelyn Waugh - are relatively unknown and a joy to discover. The collection also includes Charles Dickens' premonitory tale, "The Signalman" which was inspired by his own horrific experiences in a train crash. Katherine Mansfield's "The Voyage", meanwhile, is a sensual narrative centring on a boat journey and set in her native New Zealand. Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens" is different again, dramatically evoking its setting, awash with colour and light. Tragic or comic, traditional or modernist, each and every piece demonstrates perfectly how the short story form can be as engaging and satisfying as a novel, if not more so.

This handbook is the most comprehensive and up-to-date single volume on the history and memory of the Holocaust in Britain. It traces the complex relationship between Britain and the destruction of Europe’s Jews, from societal and political responses to persecution in the 1930s, through formal reactions to war and genocide, to works of representation and remembrance in post-war Britain. Through this process the handbook not only updates existing historiography of Britain and the Holocaust; it also adds new dimensions to our understanding by exploring the constant interface and interplay of history and memory. The chapters bring together internationally renowned academics and talented younger scholars. Collectively, they examine a raft of themes and issues concerning the actions of contemporaries to the Holocaust, and the responses of those who came ‘after’. At a time when the Holocaust-related activity in Britain proceeds apace, the contributors to this handbook highlight the importance of rooting what we know and understand about Britain and the Holocaust in historical actuality. This, the volume suggests, is the only way to respond meaningfully to the challenges posed by the Holocaust and ensure that the memory of it has purpose.