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More Tales from a Contested City

Peter Cookson Smith

English , 2026/10 Proverse Hong Kong

Tags: Modern fiction, Street fiction, Urban fiction

210 x 210 x 17 mm , 276pp ISBN / ISSN : 978-988-8834-34-1

  • US$34.65

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All orders will be fulfilled by Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/9888834355

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Like its predecessor (Tales from a Contested City), More Tales from a Contested City provocatively reflects the often confounding and contentious history and personality of Hong Kong. The stories range from narratives of real life to the largely inventive; from the serious to the satirical. Past, present and future are imaginatively intertwined in a variety of situations which explore the city's underlying chemistry. The tales illuminate many corners of the urban experience, sometimes injected with the necessary dose of congeniality mixed with occasional melancholy which is embedded in the city's life force. While some of the tales have a perceptible foundation in past occurrences, they simultaneously encapsulate the quirkiness of the city as well as its familiarities. The book uses the abstract nature of fiction to address some of the issues and indirect challenges facing this Special Administrative Region of China. 

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"Reading More Tales from a Contested City is like walking into a renaissance man's cabinet of curiosities only the curios include not only ornaments, but events and histories, as well as the personages consumed by these material and non-material cultures. Not unlike cartoonist and humourist James Thurber, Peter Cookson Smith conjures a range of illustrations and tales with an enviable legerdemain.”

—Jason S Polley, Associate Professor of English, Academy of Language and Culture, FASS, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong. Co-editor of Everyday Evil in Stephen King's America: Essays, Images, Paratexts (Routledge 2024).


“The physical and cultural splendours and complexities of Hong Kong have long sparked whimsical imaginings. From these exigencies and opportunities have emerged both celebrated successes and hopes that fell short. The stories and drawings in this volume play with that spinit, inviting your imagination into its own speculations about the lives that drive the vibrancy of the intense city.“

—Professor Tom Kvan, SUSTech School of Design, Shenzhen, P.R. China


"Peter Cookson Smith's diverse stories, accompanied by his fine line drawings, capture Hong Kong's speedy, passionate, carefree and exasperating character.”

—John Batten, Hong Kong art critic and heritage activist

Peter Cookson Smith is a long-time resident of Hong Kong. In 1977 he founded URBIS — one of the first specialist city-planning, urban-design and environmental consultancies in South-east Asia, where the company has carried out more than 3,000 projects over the years. He directed some of the first new town and urban regeneration studies in Hong Kong and has directed an extensive range of projects across Asia. He was one of the first design professionals from the West to carry out city planning and urban revitalization projects for the PRC government during the early 1980s following the 'Open Door Policy'. Over the past twenty years he has acted as an adviser on development strategy for large parts of the Greater Bay Area. For several years he was an Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Architecture and is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a Past-President of both the Hong Kong Institute of Planners and the Hong Kong Institute of Urban Design. He writes and lectures widely on the subject of urban design, and is the author and illustrator of eight books: The Urban Design of Impermanence (2006) about Hong Kong; The Urban Design of Concession (2011) about the growth and development of Chinese Treaty Port cities; The Urban Design of Intervention (2014) about Asian cities; Seeking Savannah (2018) about American Urbanism; An Enterprising Path to Barrio Chino (2019) on the planning history of Barcelona; After Dante - Divine, Design and the Cosmos (2020), which focuses on Dante's poetic narrative and the philosophical, artistic and scientific forces that engaged with the emerging culture of the Renaissance; Shaping Canton (2022) focusing on the history and modernization of Guangzhou; and Writings on the Asian City (2023) covering the different urban cultures, commonalities and urban forms of Asia This was followed by Tales from a Contested City (2025), the author's first book of fiction, followed by More Tales from a Contested City (2026).


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