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The Sum of Our Follies is a novel set in Lubok Sayong, an imaginary Malaysian town. Two narrators describe Lubok Sayong and its community of quirky inhabitants. The first is Auyong, a retiree from the city who operates a lychee factory in Lubok Sayong. The other is eleven-year-old Mary Anne, an orphan who is taken in by an irascible woman in charge of the Big House. Through anecdotes and gentle humour, the two narrators observe the events that change the town and their lives as modernity sets in and Mary Anne grows up.
This polyphonic collection of twenty-five stories presents a multitude of Malaysian perspectives spanning age, gender, and class. Yow char kwai hawkers compete for customers on a busy city street. Marital dynamics unfurl at an abortion clinic. On an island, a man's infatuation with a veiled woman takes a supernatural turn. A woman writes to her brother about their dead cat. Characters in these stories connect through chance encounters and fateful events. Their narratives are inevitably coloured by the social tension and occasional absurdities of a multicultural society. Shortlisted for the 2009 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize.
This book offers a scholarly perspective on heritage as a discourse, concept and lived experience in Malaysia. It argues that heritage is not a received narrative but a construct in the making. Starting with alternative ways of “museumising” heritage, the book then addresses a broad range of issues involving multicultural and folklore heritage, the small town, nostalgia and the environment, and transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. In so doing it delivers an intervention in received ways of talking about and “doing” heritage in academic as well as state and public discourse in Malaysia, which are largely dominated by perspectives that do not sufficiently engage with the cultural complexities and sociopolitical implications of heritage. The book also critically explores the politics and dynamics of heritage production in Malaysia to contest “Malaysian heritage” as a stable narrative, exploring both its cogency and contingency, and builds on a deep engagement with a non-western society in the service of “provincialising” critical heritage studies, with the broader goal of contributing to Malaysian studies.
KL NOIR: Red is the first of 4 volumes about the Malaysian capital city's dark side. There are 14 short stories and one essay about the seedy, the sinister and sometimes the spooky. You will find murder, drug-dealing, kidnapping, sexual depravity, prostitution, celebrity secrets, suicides, academic rivalry, gangsters, police brutality, cannibalism, black magic, creepy rituals, political corruption and even busking. It's all totally fictional. Well, maybe the cannibalism is.
A debut short story collection from one of Canada's most exciting new Aboriginal voices. "In our family, it was Trish who was Going To Be Trouble; I was Such a Good Girl." At times haunting, at times hilarious, Just Pretending explores the moments in life that send us down pathways predetermined and not-yet-forged. These are the liminal, defining moments that mark irreversible transitions n girl to mother, confinement to freedom, wife to murderer. They are the melodramatic car-crash moments n the outcomes both horrific and too fascinating to tear our eyes from. And they are the unnoticed, infinitely tiny moments, seemingly insignificant (even ridiculous) yet holding the power to alter, to transform, to make strange. What links these stories is a sense of characters working n both with success and without, through action or reaction n to separate reality from perception and to make these moments into their lives' new truths.
Including: A response to critics, and: Ten rules for "serious" writers, the author continues his fight on behalf of the American reader, arguing against pretension in so-called "literary" fiction, naming names and exposing the literary status quo.
To escape the choking heat of deep summer, Sky and his family survive on stories of the dead in an underground darkness at the end of the world.
Learning How to Love China tells the story of a young factory worker in a city near Shanghai. She tries to set down some of the weight she carries for her work and family. It's a tale of her droning daily life in our contemporary world of global economies, many run by authoritarian power structures. The book shows us the consequences of unbridled accumulation and the systemic exploitation of certain groups. And it asks the question, are we all to blame somehow?
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Tom Cull's debut collection is equal parts zoo, fun-house, and curio cabinet. A mouthy badger tells off a search committee, a family of beavers conspire to commit murder, a celebrity seal slips his cage, and a flock of seabirds pay a visit to Ripley's Aquarium. In these poems, human and animal spaces overlap, often marking moments of transgression, rebellion, escape, and capture. The rural logic of everyday violence stands in relief to urban hyper-spectacles of animal incursion. Home and habitat are flooded with invasive species, cute animals videos, and rising tides.Cull's lyricism ranges from the intimate to the mythopoeic; speaking in the language of mimicry, ventriloquism, tall tale, and zinger. Within this stunning debut, animals collide, conspire, and transform, creeping through the narrative spaces of these poems and intimating apocalypse as both end and beginning