passing through is, by any standard, a major book – a compilation of previously uncollected or unpublished work by the great Tom Leonard (1944 - 2018), including characteristically beautiful poetry, powerful essays, and perceptive review pieces on artists such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Norman MacCaig. It is a volume which presents the range of Tom Leonard’s artistry: his deep insight, but also the remarkable subtlety, humour, and empathy that permeates all of his writing.

All to Blazes is a selection of the finest stories of Frank Sargeson (1903 – 1982). Sargeson’s stories capture the everyday life of ordinary New Zealanders at home, at work, and in search of both. Originally published between 1935 and 1966, they are still fresh, still fizzing with linguistic energy, and still able to shock as well as delight.

Featuring stories by James Kelman, Bernard MacLaverty, Janice Galloway, Alan Warner, A.L. Kennedy, Jenni Fagan, David Keenan, Kevin Williamson, John King, Wendy Erskine, Chika Unigwe, Duncan McLean, Ron Butlin, Graeme Armstrong, Kevin MacNeil, Stewart Home, and many more...
The Common Breath Short Prose Anthology is a celebration of fiction in its shortest form, uniting work from some of the greatest contemporary novelists, alongside an exciting selection from TCB's open submissions process, and supplemented by pieces from a range of literary history's finest artists.

Originally released in the USA in 1935, Tom Kromer's incredible novel of the Great Depression is now re-published in a beautiful new edition featuring an introductory essay by Duncan McLean.

Waiting for Nothing reveals the heart, humanity, and even humour of a person trapped within a desperate period of our history - a history that is never entirely in the past.

This publication is a limited special-edition printed pamphlet, written and produced in summer 2020 as an artistic response to recent events in America, and across the world. Each letterpress pamphlet is individually bound and numbered.

Look At Me How by A.L. Kennedy is written and produced in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. A stunning long-form poetic work touching on issues of history, race, identity, and love. It is a privilege for The Common Breath to work with an artist like A.L., and to bring this publication to you.

These stories move from Mull's windswept beaches to the darkened backroom of a Glasgow strip club, from night-time on snow-covered slopes to the claustrophobia of a bizarre bus journey, but what develops through the differences in setting and style is a shared commitment to local culture and language, to warm humour, and most of all, to listening for the characters to emerge and express themselves within the text.

In the early 2000s, not long after graduating from Art School, Stuart Murray was conscripted to attend a 'Gateway to Work' course, as part of the New Deal workfare programme which was introduced by Tony Blair's first New Labour government. Almost fifteen years later, aided by extensive notes made at the time, this book documents that experience in both words and pictures.

“Stuart Murray has produced over 40 drawings which seek to capture a sense of random encounters with the dispossessed – beggars, junkies, prostitutes, the starving, alcoholics…. The strength of the book is its cumulative effect, the way in which a progression of anonymous characters seem to become increasingly familiar as you increasingly recognise your own encounters. Slowly, as you turn the pages, you begin to realise that in fact the subject of the book is not only (perhaps not mainly) the dispossessed it portrays. In large part, you are the subject of the book. You and your ability to forget these encounters, to fail to see the people portrayed as you scurry by to your train. Your ability to dispossess the dispossessed of one of the few things they had left – their role in our identity.”
- Robin McAlpine, Scottish Left Review, Apr/May ’06 issue

Fifteen drawings made on a ten-day visit to Bucharest, Romania during October 2006, and two new drawings made in retrospect. The original 15 images were exhibited as part of a group show in Bucharest at the end of the trip.