Spatterlight
We manage rights for science-fiction and fantasy legend Jack Vane (1916 - 2013) and selected titles by Tanith Lee, Michael Shea, Matthew Hughes, and others.
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Sparsile Books
Sparsile Books is an independent publisher, based in Glasgow, specialising in high quality fiction and non-fiction. We see publishing as an art in itself, and work closely with our authors to ensure that the books we publish give readers a unique vision of the world. Since our beginning in 2018, we have been fortunate to discover some truly exceptional writers, and look forward to developing many more.
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Promoted Content
Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2022Researching urban space and the built environment
by Jonathan Blaney, Simon Trafford, Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin, Elaine Tierney, Charlotte Wildman
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Promoted Content
Humanities & Social SciencesAugust 2024The machinic city
Media, performance and participation
by Marcos P. Dias
As human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban landscape, The machinic city argues that performance art can help us to understand contemporary urban living. Dias analyses interventions from performance artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life, and speculation on its future. While cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, Dias analyses the performative potential of the aesthetic machine, as it assembles with media, capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is examined through its different components - design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city.
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Trusted Partner
Geography & the EnvironmentJune 2025Demystifying informal urban design and planning
Insights from Asia
by Mahyar Arefi
Touting informal settlements or informality in general as illegal, crime-ridden, unsafe, filthy, chaotic, and formal developments as legal, orderly or safe, and so forth has not solved anything and informality as a way of life or an economic reality lingers and grows. Demystifying informal urban design and planning delves deeper into this conundrum and seeks to debunk some common misguided perceptions about it. Borrowing popular philosophical and political analogies from Isaiah Berlin and Gregory Treverton and others, it encourages urban designers and planners to become multitaskers like foxes rather than hedgehogs who can do one thing right. The book ends with some general takeaways on assuming more proactive roles in informal urban design issues and avoiding two potential pitfalls while interacting with them.
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Trusted Partner
Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2023Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan
Young men and the digital economy
by Hannah Schilling
Digital technologies promise efficiency and comfort, but the smoothness of platform services relies on the hidden social labour of those who keep the gig economy running. This book presents a comparative ethnography of young men making a living through digital technologies: selling mobile airtime in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and app-based delivery riders in Berlin, Germany. These case studies explore the significance of symbolic capital in urban youth's social existence and organisation of livelihood in the digital economy, and the technological mechanisms producing a new form of urban precarity. Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan puts forward an original comparative approach to develop a global urban sociology for the digital era. It provides an innovative analytical toolbox that decentres discussions of precarity from the standard of a normal employment contract. With its focus on symbolic capital, the ethnography shows the consequences of the proliferating gig economy for status struggles among urban youth, and carefully embeds the densification of software and services into the socio-material relations on which these new urban infrastructures are built.
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Trusted Partner
Humanities & Social SciencesOctober 2025Social democracy and the urban scene
Party responses to the diversifying centre-left
by Nik. Brandal, Øivind Bratberg
Social democratic parties struggle to appeal to a divided electorate. Particularly prescient is the clash between working-class voters thatare socially conservative and middle-class voters who are liberally inclined but economicallyleft. Are politics and policies that appeal to both even a possibility? Nowhere is thatdebate more acute than in European cities, yet in no other political space are answers more likely to be found.Where urban voters turn left, they are increasingly attracted by radical and green alternatives to social democracy.Social democracy and urban politicsdelves into the changing relationship between these three party families on the urban scene. Mapping electoral geography, governing strategies and the interface between parties and social movements on the left, the authors reflect upon the formation and dilemmas of a broader progressive alliance.
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Trusted Partner
Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2022Civic identity and public space
Belfast since 1780
by Dominic Bryan, Sean J. Connolly, John Nagle
Civic identity and public space, focussing on Belfast, and bringing together the work of a historian and two social scientists, offers a new perspective on the sometimes lethal conflicts over parades, flags and other issues that continue to disrupt political life in Northern Ireland. It examines the emergence during the nineteenth century of the concept of public space and the development of new strategies for its regulation, the establishment, the new conditions created by the emergence in 1920 of a Northern Ireland state, of a near monopoly of public space enjoyed by Protestants and unionists, and the break down of that monopoly in more recent decades. Today policy makers and politicians struggle to devise a strategy for the management of public space in a divided city, while endeavouring to promote a new sense of civic identity that will transcend long-standing sectarian and political divisions.
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Trusted Partner
Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2025Growing up and going out
Youth culture, commerce, and leisure space in post-war Britain
by Sarah Kenny
In the decades following the Second World War, youthful sociability was remade as young people across Britain flocked to newly-opened coffee bars, beat clubs, and discos. These spaces, increasingly unknown and unfamiliar to the adults who passed by them, played a remarkable role in reshaping town and city centres after dark as sites of leisure and recreation. Telling the history of youth in post-war Britain from the ground up, through the towns and cities that young people moved through, this book traces how the new spaces of post-war youth leisure transformed both young people's relationship with their local environment and adults' perceptions of the possibilities and dangers of modern leisure. Growing up and going out offers a timely study of youth, commerce, and leisure that explores the reimagination, remaking, and regulation of the post-war city after dark.
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Literature & Literary StudiesMarch 2023
Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature
Emotions, ethics, dreams
by Megan Leitch
Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.
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Trusted Partner
Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2025Urbicide in Syria
A postcolonial understanding of civil war
by Gabriel Garroum Pla
This book provides an exhaustive analysis of the relationship between violence, urban space, and political subjectivity in Syria. It does so through an exploration of how urbicide, the violent destruction and alteration of the urban fabric, becomes a tool for the regime's governmental and sovereign exercise of power, decisively redefining state-society dynamics and cementing political loyalty in Syria. Adopting a critical and postcolonial perspective, and through the cases of Damascus and Aleppo, the volume presents a unique perspective on the civil war by examining socio-material changes in everyday political spaces and processes, from mundane destruction to urban development and reconstruction efforts, and how these are experienced by local communities. Featuring rich data collection through interviews, archival research, and aesthetic sources, the book ultimately foregrounds Syrians' political agency and creativity despite ruination.
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Trusted Partner
Geography & the EnvironmentJune 2026
Living the urban periphery
by Paula Meth, Sarah Charlton, Tom Goodfellow, Alison Todes
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Geography & the EnvironmentAugust 2020Urban transformations and public health in the emergent city
by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, Susan Parnell
The imperatives of public health shaped our understanding of the cities of the global north in the first industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are doing so again today, reflecting new geographies of the urban age of the twenty-first. Emergent cities in parts of the globe experiencing most profound urban growth face major problems of economic, ecological and social sustainability when making sense of new health challenges and designing policy frameworks for public health infrastructures. The rapid evolution of complex 'systems of systems' in today's cities continually reconfigure the urban commons, reshaping how we understand urban public health, defining new problems and drawing on new data tools for analysis that work from the historical legacies and geographical variations that structure public health systems.
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Trusted Partner
Literature & Literary StudiesApril 2026Zadie Smith
New perspectives
by Nurten Birlik, Noémi Albert
Zadie Smith's fiction reimagines subjectivity, relationality, and the conditions of contemporary life. This book offers a timely reassessment of her work, addressing identity, urban experience, and the category of the human. Moving beyond postcolonial and multiculturalist readings, it brings psychoanalytic, historical, symptomatic, and cultural materialist perspectives to bear across her novels, stories, essays, and plays. The collection explores how Smith's characters, shaped by diverse backgrounds and settings, challenge fixed ideas of Britishness and personhood. It argues that her writing opens up a new ontological space-defined by fluid identities, shifting subjectivities, and evolving forms of relationality. By reconsidering both the human and the spatial in Smith's work, the book makes a valuable contribution to contemporary literary criticism and to current thinking on narrative, identity, and urban life.
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Humanities & Social SciencesDecember 2021Crafting identities
Artisan culture in London, c. 1550–1640
by Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin, Christopher Breward, James Ryan
Crafting identities explores artisanal identity and culture in early modern London. It demonstrates that the social, intellectual and political status of London's crafts and craftsmen were embedded in particular material and spatial contexts. Through examination of a wide range of manuscript, visual and material culture sources, the book investigates for the first time how London's artisans physically shaped the built environment of the city and how the experience of negotiating urban spaces impacted directly on their distinctive individual and collective identities. Applying an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology to the examination of artisanal cultures, the book engages with the fields of social and cultural history and the histories of art, design and architecture. It will appeal to scholars of early modern social, cultural and urban history, as well as those interested in design and architectural history.
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The ArtsJanuary 2026
David Simon's American City
by Mikkel Jensen
This book examines the television serials created by influential showrunner David Simon. The book argues that Simon's main theme is the state of the contemporary American city and that all of his serials (barring one about the Iraq War) explore different facets of the metropolis. Each series offers distinctly different visions of the American city, but taken together they represent a sustained and intricate exploration of urban problems in modern America. From deindustrialisation in The Wire and residential segregation in Show Me a Hero to post-Katrina New Orleans in Treme and the transformation of the urban core in The Deuce, David Simon's American city traces the urban through-line in Simon's body of work. Based on sustained analysis of these serials and their engagement with contemporary politics and culture, David Simon's American city offers a compelling examination of one of television's most arresting voices.
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Humanities & Social SciencesOctober 2006The experience of urban poverty, 1723–82
Parish, charity and credit
by Alannah Tomkins
This comparative study of urban poverty is the first to chart the irregular pulse of poverty's encounters with officialdom. It exploits an unusual methodology to secure new perspectives from familiar sources. The highly localised characteristics of the welfare economy generated a peculiarly urban environment for the poor. Separate chapters examine the parameters of workhouse life when the preconceptions of contemporaries have been stripped away; the reach of institutional charities such as almshouses, schools and infirmaries; and the surprisingly broad clientele of urban pawnbrokers. Detailed analysis of the poor is achieved via meticulous matching of individuals who fell within the purview of two or more authorities. The result is a unique insight into the survival economics of urban poverty, arising not from a tidy network of welfare but from a loose assembly of options, where the impoverished positioned themselves repeatedly to fit official, philanthropic, or casual templates of the 'deserving'. This book will be essential reading for historians of English poverty and welfare, and eighteenth-century social and economic life. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2015Governing Europe's spaces
European Union re-imagined
by Dimitris Papadimitriou, Caitriona Carter, Martin Lawn, Simon Bulmer, Andrew Geddes, Peter Humphreys
What do we imagine when we imagine Europe and the European Union? To what extent is our understanding of the EU - of its development, its policies and its working processes - shaped by unacknowledged assumptions about what Europe really is? The book constructs a case for re-imagining Europe - not as an entity in Brussels or a series of fixed relations - but as a simultaneously real and imagined space of action which exists to the extent that Europeans and others act in and on it. This Europe is constantly being made in particular spaces, through specific actor struggles, whose interconnections are often ill-defined. We ask how do those concerned with building Europe, with extending and elaborating the EU, think of where they are and what they are doing? The book captures Europeans in the process of making Europe: of performing, interpreting, modelling, referencing, consulting, measuring and de-politicising Europe. ;
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Geography & the EnvironmentMarch 2021Sanctuary cities and urban struggles
by Jonathan Darling, Harald Bauder
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Literature & Literary StudiesJanuary 2013The towns of Italy in the later Middle Ages
by Trevor Dean
The towns of Italy in the later middle ages presents over one hundred fascinating documents, carefully selected and coordinated from the richest, most innovative and most documented society of the European Middle Ages. No other English language sourcebook has the same geographical or chronological range. This collection is carefully structured around the crisis of the fourteenth century and arranged in contrasting groups of texts. By connecting documents in translation to recent scholarship and debates, it addresses five key areas of medieval urban history: the physical environment, civic religion, economy, society and politics. Offers students well-translated and effectively contextualised documents along with some guidance to the secondary work of Italian scholars which is largely inaccessible to undergraduate students.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2021African cities and collaborative futures
Urban platforms and metropolitan logistics
by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, Susan Parnell
This groundbreaking volume brings together scholars from across the globe to discuss the infrastructure, energy, housing, safety and sustainability of African cities, as seen through local narratives of residents. Drawing on a variety of fields and extensive first-hand research, the contributions offer a fresh perspective on some of the most pressing issues confronting urban Africa in the twenty-first century. At a time when the future of the region as a whole will be determined in large part by its cities, the implications of these developments are profound. With case studies from cities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, this volume explores how the rapid growth of African cities is reconfiguring the relationship between urban social life and its built forms. While the most visible transformations in cities today can be seen as infrastructural, these manifestations are cultural as well as material, reflecting the different ways in which the city is rationalised, economised and governed. How can we 'see like a city' in twenty-first-century Africa, understanding the urban present to shape its future? This is the central question posed throughout this volume, with a practical focus on how academics, local decision makers and international practitioners can collaborate to meet the challenge of rapid growth, environmental pressures and resource gaps.
