Lost On Purpose

From the shifting tableaux of Whitman's Manhattan to Joyce's beloved Dublin, urban life has always inspired fiction. In this spirit comes LOST ON PURPOSE - a vibrant collection of short fiction whose characters are in love with cities: the intricate virtual connections between disparate Londoners; the magic of chance meetings in Beijing; the ghosts who inhabit Los Angeles' Echo Park.

LOST ON PURPOSE includes original fiction from writers like Trinie Dalton, Amy Hempel, Courtney Eldridge and Amy Prior that range from stories centred on street parking tickets, to a teenager's reflection on moving city, to parties in urban warehouses.

INTRODUCTION (EXTRACTS):
"We are in love with the city, the way others love the country. We romanticise its streets and buildings and parks and wastelands and clubs and movie theatres with remembrances of things past, our histories recalled in a kind of fragmentary collage of glimpsed images and sound and chatter when we turn this corner or that, a kind of personal psychogeography. We tell new stories, make our own myths, rival the old tales. A new city can be a dreamy, Oz-like land waiting to be discovered, and we trail the yellow brick road to seek exile from other places - towns, countries, villages, fields - experiencing the intensity of newness once we arrive. We discover new urban districts in the same way: we move around the city and it becomes cities, each neighborhood another mini-empire. We go from work to record shop to supermarket to gallery to theme park to pizzeria to glittery warehouse party, and somehow through the fog of the faceless, we find our neighbours, friends. We connect in strange ways, indecipherable networks. Sometimes we get wrapped up in our heads and the city becomes a blurry background on which to project our moods; sometimes we take the difficult way around. Sometimes we get lost on purpose: we lose ourselves in the crowds and turn into someone new. In 'Lost On Purpose', we are making sense of these things, telling new fictional stories, reinterpreting the old. We are viewing a detail - a house, a street - under a magnifying lens, and calming the background noise so the city begins to unravel, collapsing into focus. We are crossing international borders, finding patterns. Our experiences are unique, our experiences are universal."
Amy Prior