Literature Across Frontiers and Comma Press launch a new iPhone application.

Gimbal offers a new way of reading the city. Choose a city – anywhere in the world – and be transported to it by its fiction. Traverse its precincts. Map your way through its quarters or arrondissements. The Gimbal navigates as it narrates. With it you can travel by train, tram, metro, bus or indeed on foot, experiencing each new landscape through the eyes of a fictional character.

Designed with the commuter in mind, the Gimbal enables you to escape the tedium of your everyday ‘known journey’ and take an alternative route, a more scenic, imaginary one across the face of an unknown city. Choose a story according to the city you wish to visit, or the length of time you have to spare, and the ‘TRAVEL BY SOUND’ function will lead you across an interactive map of that city accompanied by an audio reading.

Devised by Comma Press and our sister organisation, Literature Across Frontiers and developed by Toru Interactive, Gimbal brings together the fruits of the Literature Across Frontiers’ Tramlines project and the best of Comma’s ‘Reading the City’ commissions.

Gimbal will be available for FREE on the App Store from Tuesday 16th April.

Image: on the Alexandria tram, as seen by Francesc Serés.

App Launch

London Book Fair, Tuesday the 16th of April, Earls Court Exhibition Centre, Warwick Road, London, UK, SW5 9TA.

Featuring authors Alison MacLeod, Michelle Green and Roman Simić, Jim Hinks (Comma), Alexandra Büchler (LAF), and app designer Sean Toru.

1.30pm – 2.15pm, Mall Room, EC2

App Demo with Jim Hinks

3.15pm – 3.30pm, Literary Translation Centre

About Tramlines

Tramlines was a residency project hosted by Literature Across Frontiers which took place in 2012 and 2013 across eight European and North African cities. Writers from Alexandria, Barcelona, Brussels, Istanbul, Manchester, Prague, Riga and Zagreb were paired up and visited the other’s city with the task of exploring each cityscape through its tram network, in order to write stories that uncovered hidden corners and engaged with local communities and commuters. The residency authors were: Roman Simić (from Zagreb visiting Manchester), Michelle Green (from Manchester visiting Zagreb), Inga Zolude (from Riga visiting Brussels), Koen Peeters (from Brussels visiting Riga), Eman Abdelhamid (from Alexandria visiting Barcelona), Francesc Serés (from Barcelona visiting Alexandria), Jana Šrámková (from Prague visiting Istanbul), and Nermin Yıldırım (from Istanbul visiting Prague). Tramlines is supported Arts Council England (Lottery-funded) and the Culture Programme of the EU.

About Reading the City

‘Reading the City’ is an on-going anthology series commissioned by Comma Press to explore ways for fictional narratives and urban landscapes to interact. The series has produced eight anthologies to date, including Madinah: City Stories from the Middle East, Shi Cheng: Short Stories from Urban China, and Decapolis: Tales from Ten Cities. The series has so far covered over 50 cities and translated dozens of writers into English for the first time. ‘Reading the City’ is part of Comma’s wider commitment to the short story as a uniquely portable or mobile literary form, able to transcend boundaries, be they cultural, linguistic or disciplinary. Visit the Comma website to find out more.