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Forbidden Cities

This collection of stories marked the culmination of ten years’ experimentation in the short-fiction form and explored Morris’s ongoing interest in the city as a place of escape, transgression, transformation, disguise and reinvention, with settings including London, Budapest, New York, Shanghai, New Orleans, Los Angeles and Auckland. Six stories were published here for the first time, alongside seven already published or broadcast. The latter were all re-written for inclusion here and expanded in length; in many the location and/or time period were also changed to better investigate the collection’s themes of exile and displacement. For example, ‘The Party’ moved setting from Auckland to Long Island in New York, and Hurricane Katrina’s destruction along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi (not present in the original story) became crucial to the plot in the revised story.