n these glimpses of suburban life, Pete Court's gentle yet sharp observations of the human condition manage to be both sardonic and compassionate. In language that sings with inventiveness and a joyfully grim humour, each tale is woven through with touches of the magical, little sparkling surprises that add a thread of mystic wonder throughout the whole. At the end of it all I was left contemplating just how well I was living, loving and being a Light in the Darkness. - D.M.Cornish, author, Monster Blood Tattoo series Court's prose is a world of its own. In these stories he gets into the minds of some desperate and 'unbelievable' characters. While the stories are gruesome, they make a case for our common humanity. Above all, they have verve and incredible energy. - Phillip Edmonds, author of Tilting at Windmills and Leaving Home with Henry Court's precise evocative writing gives us troubling stories, inviting the reader into challenging worlds of grotesquerie and distortion. In scenes reminiscent of Kafka, all three novellas are a search for elusive threads of meaning, with the Dark as a linking motif. . . . Intriguing and compelling reading. - Valerie Volk, author of Even Grimmer Tales and Bystanders P.H. Court's Sub Urban Tales navigate that mysterious territory where time, place and eternity meet. At once intriguing, sometimes gruesome, often hilarious and always relatable, these cunningly interwoven tales remind us of the extraordinary in the ordinary, the grace reflected in all surfaces though dimmed by the Dark of human conceit. - James Cooper, Head of Creative Writing, Tabor College P. H. Court is co-host of the popular Breakfast with Kit and Pete on Adelaide's 1079 Life and is creative writer for the radio station. He is an adjunct lecturer at Tabor College and a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at University of Adelaide. He has published numerous award winning short stories and satires.

Exploring fiction, film and art from across the USA, South America, Asia, Europe and Australia, New Suburban Stories brings together new research from leading international scholars to examine cultural representations of the suburbs, home to a rapidly increasing proportion of the world's population. Focussing in particular on works that challenge conventional attitudes to suburbia, the book considers how suburban communities have taken control of their own representation to tell their own stories in contemporary novels, poetry, autobiography, cinema, social media and public art.

Most new urban growth takes place in the suburbs; consequently, infrastructures are in a constant state of playing catch-up, creating repeated infrastructure crises in these peripheries. However, the push to address the tensions stemming from this rapid growth also allow the suburbs to be a major source of urban innovation. Taking a critical social science perspective to identify political, economic, social, and environmental issues related to suburban infrastructures, this book highlights the similarities and differences between suburban infrastructure conditions encountered in the Global North and Global South. Adopting an international approach grounded in case studies from three continents, this book discusses infrastructure issues within different suburban and societal contexts: low-density infrastructure-rich Global North suburban areas, rapidly developing Chinese suburbs, and the deeply socially stratified suburbs of poor Global South countries. Despite stark differences between types of suburbs, there are features common to all suburban areas irrespective of their location, and similarities in the infrastructure issues confronting these different categories of suburbs.

Suburban space has traditionally been understood as a formless remnant of physical city expansion, without a dynamic or logic of its own. Suburban Urbanities challenges this view by defining the suburb as a temporally evolving feature of urban growth.Anchored in the architectural research discipline of space syntax, this book offers a comprehensive understanding of urban change, touching on the history of the suburb as well as its current development challenges, with a particular focus on suburban centres. Studies of the high street as a centre for social, economic and cultural exchange provide evidence for its critical role in sustaining local centres over time. Contributors from the architecture, urban design, geography, history and anthropology disciplines examine cases spanning Europe and around the Mediterranean.By linking large-scale city mapping, urban design scale expositions of high street activity and local-scale ethnographies, the book underscores the need to consider suburban space on its own terms as a specific and complex field of social practice

By adopting an approach that is sensitive to issues of difference as well as to the role of the state, Cities of Difference considers the fragmentation of city life and the complex relationship between identity, power and place.

This collection explores the history and development of the anglophone short story since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Explores how the suburban imaginary, composed of the built environment and imaginative texts, functions as a resource for living out the "good life"

In the first book to consider British suburban literature from the vantage point of imperial and postcolonial studies, Todd Kuchta argues that suburban identity is tied to the empire’s rise and fall. He takes his title from the type of home synonymous with suburbia. Like the semi-detached house, which joins separate dwellings under one roof, suburbia and empire were geographically distinct but imaginatively linked. Yet just as the "semi" conceals two homes behind a single façade, suburbia’s apparent uniformity masks its defining oppositions—between country and city, "civilization" and "savagery," master and slave. While some people saw the suburbs as homegrown colonies, others viewed them as a terra incognita beyond the pale of British culture. Surveying a range of popular and canonical texts, Kuchta reveals the suburban foundations of a variety of unexpected fictional locales: the Thames Valley of H. G. Wells’s Martian attack and the gaslit London of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, but also the tropical backwaters of Joseph Conrad’s Malay Archipelago and the imperial communities of Raj fiction by E. M. Forster and George Orwell. This capacious view demonstrates suburbia's vital role in science fiction, detective tales, condition-of-England novels, modernist narratives of imperial decline, and contemporary multicultural fiction. Drawing on postcolonial theory, urban studies, and architectural scholarship, this book will appeal to readers interested in Victorian, modern, and contemporary British literature and cultures, especially those concerned with how place shapes class and masculine identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Suburban Empire takes readers to the US missile base at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, at the matrix of postwar US imperial expansion, the Cold War nuclear arms race, and the tide of anti-colonial struggles rippling across the world. Hirshberg shows that the displacement of indigenous Marshallese within Kwajalein Atoll mirrors the segregation and spatial politics of the mainland US as local and global iterations of US empire took hold. Tracing how Marshall Islanders navigated US military control over their lands, Suburban Empire reveals that Cold War–era suburbanization was perfectly congruent with US colonization, military testing, and nuclear fallout. The structures of suburban segregation cloaked the destructive history of control and militarism under a veil of small-town innocence.

"The New Suburbia explores how the suburbs transitioned from bastions of segregation into spaces of multiracial living. They are the second generation of suburbs after 1945, moving from starkly segregated whiteness into a more varied, uneven social landscape. The suburbs came to hold a broad cross-section of people - rich, poor, Black American, Latino, Asian, immigrant, the unhoused, and the lavishly housed, and everyone in between. In the new suburbia, white advantage persisted, but it existed alongside rising inequality, ethnic and racial diversity, and new family configurations. Through it all, the common denominators of suburbia remained - low-slung landscapes of single-family homes and yards and families seeking the good life. On this familiar landscape, the American dream endured even as the dreamers changed"--