Short stories and pieces of writing from the Winter 2014 YPSShort work from contributing members of the Swansea Young People's Writing Squad, run by Jo Furber with the support of Literature Wales at the Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea.

New Yorker fiction writer Cynan Jones returns with a powerful climate crisis story about love and loss that offers a glimpse of a tangible future in which water is commodified and vulnerable to sabotage. "As a tract of written language, it is close to perfect. As a repository for ideas, it is imaginative and far reaching. As a story of and for our times, it is very human, and deadly serious." —Nina Allen, The Guardian Water is commodified. The Water Train that serves the city increasingly at risk of sabotage. As news breaks that construction of a gigantic Ice Dock will displace more people than first thought, protestors take to the streets and the lives of several individuals begin to interlock. A nurse on the brink of an affair. A boy who follows a stray dog out of the city. A woman who lies dying. And her husband, a marksman: a man forged by his past and fearful of the future, who weighs in his hands the possibility of death...

Stories from the DylanED Project, the education programme of the University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize. Stories produced by Year 8 pupils from Bro Myrddin, Tre Gib, and Cwrt Sart schools.Mona Jenks is 37, divorced two times and widowed once. She is short in stature, but long on sarcasm. She is conceited, selfish, and snooty. She always wants more than whatever she deserves. She’s a small town reporter with big dreams. Fame and fortune are her goals. Analytical, and raised to spurn myths and legends, she has no belief in the supernatural, but she’s about to be proven wrong--in the worst possible way as she sets out for her ordinary, boring job on a day that will change her life forever – Friday the thirteenth.

Praise for Cynan Jones:"[A] piercing novella. . . . Like Cormac McCarthy, Jones can make the everyday sound fraught and biblical."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review"Jones's perfectly pitched novel will appeal to anyone looking beyond sheer thrills."—Library Journal"This slim volume has all the gravity of a black hole, and reading it is like standing on the event horizon. . . . It's like a more beautiful Cormac McCarthy; a darker W.H. Auden."—Elliot Bay Book Company"There's nothing bucolic about this elemental, extraordinary tale of good and evil."—Shelf AwarenessWhen a net is set, and that's the way you choose, you'll hit it. Hold, a Welsh fisherman, Grzegorz, a Polish migrant worker, and Stringer, an Irish gangster, all want the chance to make their lives better. One kilo of cocaine and the sea tie them together in a fatal series of decisions. Cynan Jones was born near Aberaeron on the west...

Hoping to give him a better start in life, Peredur's mother takes him from the estates. But when local kids cycle into his life he heads off after them, accompained by the notion of finding Arthur - an absent, imaginary guardian.. And that's when the trouble really starts. The original Peredur fights for recognition in Arthur's court. Cynan Jones turns this into a modern Quixotian romp.

"Cynan Jones is utterly brilliant. The writing in Cove is so delicate and cruel and insightful. I don't understand why no statues have been erected in his honour yet." —Eimear McBride, The Times Literary Supplement Out at sea, in a sudden storm, a man is struck by lightning. When he wakes, injured and adrift on a kayak, his memory of who he is and how he came to be here is all but shattered. He will need to rely on his instincts, resilience, and imagination to get safely back to the woman he dimly senses is waiting for his return. This is an extraordinary, visceral portrait of a man locked in a struggle with the forces of nature.

"Jones's sense of place is acute, and his passion for the landscape—for its colors, its creatures, its textures, its scents—is absolutely magnetic."—Sarah Waters"A dark, tense, and vital short novel. . . . Profound, powerful, and utterly absorbing."—The Guardian"It is a book about the essentials: life and death, cruelty and compassion. It is a book that will get in your bones, and haunt you."—Daily Telegraph"Cynan Jones's fourth novel, The Dig, is an extraordinarily powerful work—not in spite of its brevity but because of it. . . . In its marriage of profound lyricism and feeling for place, deep human compassion and unflinching savagery, this brief and beautiful novel is utterly unique."—Financial TimesBuilt of the interlocking fates of a badger-baiter and a farmer struggling through lambing season, The Dig unfolds in a stark rural setting where man, animal, and land are at...

Explodes the paradox of emotional isolation suffered by those living close together, the conflicting demands of family and farm, and this disruption of old ways by the new.