Readings July ("Sticky")

Catch our next monthly writers' event:

Date: Saturday 26th July, 2008
Time: 3.30pm
Place: Seksan's, 67, Jalan Tempinis Satu, Lucky Garden, Bangsar (Map: www.seksan.com)

The readers for this month are:

Robert Raymer
Nic Wong
Dr. Shih Toong Siong
Jason Leong
Kathleen Choo
Fahmi Fadzil & Azyml Yunor with Wayang Buku

There will also be a lucky draw for free books.

"Readings" is the birth-child of Bernice Chauly, lovingly fostered by Sharon Bakar. We are grateful to Sek San for sponsorship.

Admission free and everyone very welcome. Please pass on the invitation to anyone else you think might be interested.

This post will remain sticky-ish until the event. For more recent posts please check below.

How Indian Is Indian Writing In English?

The other day Uma raised the issue of why our published-to-critical-acclaim- overseas-Malaysian-authors :

... seemed to be everywhere else. To be anywhere but here.

The same is true of course of Indian authors. (And Pakistani authors, and Bangladeshi authors, and Sri Lankan authors, and Nigerian authors and ... the list goes on.)

Abhinav Maurya writes a very interesting piece about the phenomenon in LittleIndia [found via] :

The next time you walk into a bookstore to browse English books penned by Indian authors, try this little game. Turn to the author biography to see which continent he currently calls home. If you are pondering established names on the literary scene, chances are that nine times out of ten, you will hit upon the phenomenon of the Indian English writer in self-imposed exile.

She ponders the reasons for this, muses on the effects on the writing :

The multiculturalism evident in the works of émigré Indian writers is a result of the alienation they have suffered from both cultures, Indian and western, and their struggle to bridge the gap between the two. It is often because of the distance these writers must contend with between themselves and the milieu of their stories that a certain longing and sentimentality often creeps into their works. Though this element of nostalgia has often been debunked by the critics, it may well be seen as the hallmark of an emerging class of Indian writers.

And in the end recognises :

Whatever the reasons, the exile has done more good than harm to the Indian literary scene, with publishing houses and literary agencies setting up base in India, in recognition of the growing importance of Indian writing in the global scene. The press has been flooded for some years now with stories of major publishing houses like Penguin, HarperCollins and Random House flocking to India in expectation of a literary boom in the country. This in turn has helped many English writers living in India find good publishers and recognition for their work.

Not to mention of course the encouragement for writers inherent in seeing someone from your own part of the world succeed globally.

By the way, I take issue with Maurya saying that Hari Kunzru is an Indian author settled abroad! He was born in Britain and brought up in Britain, but yes has an Indian father! Does everyone need to be pigeon-holed neatly into boxes that identify them as exclusively this and that?

His Record is Toast, Says Rushdie.

Don't challenge Salman Rushdie to a duel of the book-signing pen!

Wine writer Malcolm Gluck had the audacity to question whether Rushdie could possibly have signed as many books as he had claimed, or whether he had just scribbled his initials. According to Maev Kennedy in the Guardian :

Gluck's claimed record is 1,001 copies in 59 minutes, set at a wine warehouse in London in 1998. Gluck achieved this with the help of a team of three men, one fetching the copies, one opening them at the blank page, and another whisking the signed copies away.

Rushdie said he had signed 1,000 copies, on his most recent tour promoting the Enchantress of Florence, in a books warehouse in Nashville in 57 minutes.

A crack team of bookstore staff is apparently essential to facilitate the process and Rushdie is apparently right up there in the company of President Jimmy Carter, the novelist Amy Tan as one of the world's fastest book-signers. (Although the article adds that thriller writer Ken Follett could be a serious contender. He signed 2,050 copies in three-and-a-half hours at a book fair in Madrid earlier this year, beating his own record of 1,600 last year at a fair in Italy.)

Btw, I really wish bookshops here would get authors to sign stocks of their books when they are in town! The only author who did this as far as I know was naughty Nirpal. Peter Carey was the biggest one (as far as I am concerned) who got away.

Perfect!

Is there ever such a thing as a perfect novel?

I enjoyed this piece on the Paper Cuts blog, but must confess I am of the same opinion as the commenter who contributes Randall Jarrell's definition :

A novel is a prose narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it.

Some of the novels for which perfection or near perfection are claimed by blog readers here are The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lolita by Nabokov, David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, As I Lay Dying by Faulkner, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee among many many others.

(I would perhaps have added Ian McEwan's Atonement, Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day and Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.)

This is an excellent list of reading recommendations and whether any of these books really are "perfect" or not doesn't really matter, does it?

(Pin-up boy is of course Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby. Luscious.)

Another Literary Saturday

Heavens above! Once again we have a single Saturday crammed with activity of the bookish kind. I'm talking about 26th which kicks off with MPH Breakfast Club (11.00a.m. to 12.30p.m.) featuring short story writer Robert Raymer, whose collection Lovers and Strangers Revisited has just been republished by MPH. (More about Robert and the event on Eric's blog.)

I've been hoping for some time that Sarawak based Robert would find his way back over here again soon, and that I would be able to nab him for Readings@Seksan. And so it has come to pass.

This then is the second great event of the day, running from 3.30-6 p.m.) and the poster will be up on this blog as soon as I have finalised the line-up (or as far as I can, given the inherent unpredictability of this kind of event!).

Saradha Narayanan will be at Silverfish at 5.30 p.m. to talk about a little about her experience with writing and then read selected passages from her book, Freedom of Choice. (Should be possible to hop from Seksan's to Silverfish in time to catch this if you need a double/treble dose of book events.)

Meanwhile, over at Rasta Restaurant in Taman Tun (5.30-8.30), the lovely Farish Noor launches his new book Dibalik Malaysia. The hilarious Harith Iskander will be MCing and there's food! (Click the poster up to full size to see details and map.)

Can you cram in four events in one day? This is the ultimate lit-lovers challenge.

Poetika

Do you like poetry?

Do you love it?

Do you like it better than shopping?

Think Plath and Auden were your real parents?

Would your life be totally meaningless, worthless, hopeless and unbearable without it?

Do you dream of having your own poetry published so much so that you stay up late at night, night after night, writing your bestest poem ever?

Then you need PoetiKa!

JK

If you saw yourself in that intro, don't be shy about sending your work to Jerome and the other guy whose art you can see atop. The submission guidelines are here. There's also a Facebook group.

Wigfall's Win

Claire Wigfall, the youngest writer on the shortlist and a relative unknown, has won the BBC's National Short Story award with The Numbers, which Lyndsay Irvine in the Guardian calls :

... an eerie tale of life on a remote Scottish island

You can listen to it here.

Wigfall is also the author of The Loudest Sound and Nothing.

Jane Gardam was named as runnerup for The People on Privilege Hill. The other shortlisted stories were Guidelines for Measures to Cope with Disgraceful and Other Events by Richard Beard; Surge by Erin Soros; and The Names by Adam Thorpe.

The award is the world's largest for a short story and worth £15,000, and all the shortlisted stories are to be compiled into a single volume by Short Books.

(Phot0 by D.G. Jones on Flickr.)

Singapore Swordfish

Kee Thuan Chye's play critically acclaimed new play The Swordfish, Then the Concubine :

A bitingly comic satire that blends ancient myth with contemporary politics. A highly theatrical production of an exciting epic.

is being staged in Singapore from Wednesday, August 6 to Sunday, August 10, 2008 at The Drama Centre, 100 Victoria Street, National Library Building Level 3.

The play is directed by Ivan Heng and accompanied by live orchestration by Gamelan Asmaradana.

Here are links to my previous posts about the play and the Facebook page for the event is here.

Murder Most 'Orrid

This year's Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction has been won by In The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, which takes for its subject a notorious 1860 murder case in which Saville Kent, a three year old child from a respectable middle-class family disappeared from his bed. His body was later found stuffed down the privy (outside toilet).

As Charlotte Higgins explains in the Guardian :

The Road Hill House murder provoked national hysteria, and inspired writers such as Charles Dickens and that great exponent of the Victorian sensation novel, Wilkie Collins.

Chair of Judges, Rosie Boycott described the book as:

... one of those great non-fiction books that uses the techniques of fiction to magnificent effect. On first reading, it is an absolute page-turner. Then, when you reread it, you realise how many levels it has, how much it tells you - about the founding of the police, the Victorian study of physiognomy, the inherent snobbery of the time that meant that the police wouldn't touch anyone from the upper classes, because they 'couldn't' have committed a crime. ... And then there's the way the case became a media event, in a very McCann-like way. The newspapers of the time started spinning stories of who might have done it.

There's a really whizzy website for the book, complete with interactive map of the house where the murders took place. And you can read an appetite-whetting extract here.

There was a very strong shortlist for this year's prize and the other books that were nominated are :

Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher
Crow Country by Mark Cocker
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French
The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross

Malaysians for Ubud

Fancy a book-lover's dream holiday?

This year's Ubud Writers & Readers Festival will take place from the 14-19 October and has the theme Tri Hita Karana, which refers to Balinese concept of balancing Man, Nature, God.

There are plenty of literary superstars going to be there including Vikram Seth (be still my beating heart!), Indra Sinha, John Berendt, Camilla Gibb and Alexis Wright.

Malaysians will be out in force, represented this time by Preeta Samarasan, Chiew-Siah Tei, Faisal Tehrani, Amir Muhammad, and Bernice Chauly. Sharanya Manivannan, now living in India, is also invited.

Uma's Obsession

One after my own heart, Umapagan Ampikaipakan admits to a shameless book addiction in today's New Straits Times. Uma, you may remember from some time back is on the trail of the Great Malaysian Novel and believes he may be a step closer :

Recently, I found such joy in Preeta Samarasan’s Evening is the Whole Day. A novel I had hastily purchased, at Heathrow Airport, while rushing to my departure gate. I knew nothing about it except that it had a pretty cover — orange and yellow and green and turquoise — I could not help but want it. It was only later, once I had settled comfortably into my seat, safely buckled in, when I realised that it was, in fact, written by a Malaysian.

Now I don’t know about you, but each time I pick up something by a Malaysian author, I am both excited and apprehensive. I hope for the best but expect the worst. Because when you ’ve had your heart broken as many a time as I have, you eventually learn to be a little cautious.

A caution that proved to be entirely unnecessary when it came to Samarasan’s effort. I finished it in one sitting.

Her rich and beautiful prose had me enthralled for most of the 13 hours that it took for me to get home.

But what, he asks, about the great Malaysian novelist?

I was looking at the biographies of some of our authors who have recently received wide and critical acclaim only to discover that they live in France, Glasgow, London and Cape Town. I began to wonder why they seemed to be everywhere else. To be anywhere but here.

Maybe it’s because what they do is so under-appreciated over here.

Maybe it’s because they had to leave the suffocating surroundings of their youth to be able to produce something so deep and unclouded.

Because for the grass to be greener on this side, you have to be on that side.

Then again, maybe it’s because we feel more Malaysian when we are abroad. We feel special. We feel unique. We feel one of a kind. So much so, that we gain more of ourselves when we are overseas than we ever do when we are at home.

Maybe it’s true what Theroux says, that “enlightenment will always involve the poetry of departures”.

I gave this matter some thought too, a while back.

Reading Clubs?

The National Library has started a National Reading Club, launched July 1st, to help inculcate the reading habit among Malaysians, A. Kathirasen in the New Straits Times reports. The National Library has something to celebrate, it's membership has been rising steadily :

In 1990, it had 128,045 members, rising to 460,000 in 2001. The latest figure (as at July 5) puts it at 788,541.

And the Unity, Culture, Arts and Heritage Minister Datuk Seri Shafie Apdal apparently said at the event that he would propose to the government that civil servants be given a book allowance, and he wants the private sector to do likewise.

Throughout the article it's rubbed in once again that Malaysians are failing miserably at becoming readers :

According to the national book policy target, germinated in 1984, the nation should have achieved reading society status in 2000. We are eight years overdue; and, it seems, nowhere near the target. ... The findings of a National Library survey, Shafie said, showed that only 13 per cent of 27 million Malaysians read books. ... Surely it is an indictment of our collective apathy and the failure of the hundreds of reading campaigns and book exhibitions.

But as we've said before many times on this blog - What (hundreds of) reading campaigns? (As Kathirasen very tactfully puts it, there :

... has been an inability to sustain the momentum of campaigns.)

None of my blog readers seem to know anything about them. The only thing I've personally seen to indicate a campaign going on is a single poster in the library of a single sekolah rendah. Surely the evidence of a reading campaign should be everywhere? This is pretty serious when you realise that a lot of taxpayers money is being spent. (We are probably more aware of the efforts of our southern neighbours than we are of our own. And look how much fun they make reading!)

Kathirasen goes on :

The government even declared 1988 The Year of the Reader. The campaign saw a flurry of activity, including the establishment of reading committees everywhere. What became of them?

Who knew anything about these "reading committees"? What were they supposed to achieve? What is a reading committee anyway?

Ministers and directors-general ordered their underlings to set up reading corners in all federal, state and district government offices. There were calls to set up reading corners aboard trains and xpress buses, and in estates, factories and homes. What became of them?

The people who are putting books into the hands of the public successfully are individuals who see it as a personal mission - people like Amir Muhammad with his great book giveaway at KLAB, the Malaysian Book Crossers who make reading free by "releasing books into the wild", Daphne Lee with her children's Reading Room in Section 17, our friend at Departure Lounge who has turned his cafe into a travel library, the teachers who have worked to make a difference in their own schools. We need more literary activists of this kind, small terrorist cells of book-lovers, making reading accessible, cheap and sexy.

Kathirasen gives some good suggestions for improving readership, but I do find it sad and depressing that hand-wringing articles like this appear in the newspapers at regular intervals. A lot of lip-service is paid, very little done that is effective.

I wish the National Library all the best with their National Reading Club, about which I cannot find any information on the internet beyond the fact of its launch. If there's anyone reading this who can enlighten us, please do get in touch and tell us about it.

Cybergranny Signs off

Blogging may appear to be the province of the young and tech-savvy, but one centarian who embraced the medium enthusiastically was Australian Olive Riley who has just died aged 108, and was the world's oldest blogger. (She's also, incidentally, the world's oldest YouTube star!)

Her original blog is down at the moment, probably because of the number of hits, but a temporary site was set up for her here. And what a joy she sounds! The news agency says:

Riley had posted more than 70 entries on her blog from Woy Woy on the east coast since February last year, sharing her thoughts on modern life and her experiences living through the entire 20th century. ... Born in the outback town of Broken Hill on October 20 1899, she lived through two world wars and raised three children while doing various jobs, including ranch cook and barmaid.

How many family stories do we lose because we never helped our parents and grandparents to tell them for us and future generations? Perhaps you have old folks in your own family who might enjoy blogging and need a little encouragment.

(Thanks Twan Eng for sending the link.)

Confessions of a Book Reviewer

In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing-grown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter among the piles of dusty papers that surround it. He cannot throw the papers away because the wastepaper basket is already overflowing, and besides, somewhere among the unanswered letters and unpaid bills it is possible that there is a cheque for two guineas which he is nearly certain he forgot to pay into the bank. There are also letters with addresses which ought to be entered in his address book. He has lost this address book, and the thought of looking for it, or indeed of looking for anything, afflicts him with acute suicidal impulses.

I came across a reference to this piece by George Orwell in a comment left on the Guardian blog the other day, and it tickled me, as a sometime book-reviewer. (No lah, thankfully don't see much of myself in it - apart from the bit about the lost cheques!) And although it was written in 1946 there is still more than a grain of truth in it, especially :

The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long reviews — 1,000 words is a bare minimum — to the few that seem to matter. Short notes of a line or two on forthcoming books can be useful, but the usual middle-length review of about 600 words is bound to be worthless even if the reviewer genuinely wants to write it.

Sadly 600 words is the limit we are all to often told to write to in the local press, and it is very difficult as Orwell says, to do a decent job in that few words.

The 50 Best Translations

The Translators Association of the Society of Authors celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion they have compiled

... as a sampler, to provoke thought, and get people talking

a list of 50 outstanding translations of the last half century.

1. Raymond Queneau – Exercises in Style (Barbara Wright, 1958)

2. Primo Levi – If This is a Man (Stuart Woolf, 1959)

3. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa – The Leopard (Archibald Colquhoun, 1961)

4. Günter Grass – The Tin Drum (Ralph Manheim, 1962)

5. Jorge Luis Borges – Labyrinths (Donald Yates, James Irby, 1962)

6. Leonardo Sciascia – Day of the Owl (Archibald Colquhoun, 1963)

7. Alexander Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Ralph Parker, 1963)

8. Yukio Mishima – Death in Midsummer (Seidensticker, Keene, Morris, Sargent, 1965)

9. Naguib Mahfouz – Cairo Trilogy (Leila Vennewitz, 1965)

10. Octavio Paz – Labyrinth of Solitude (Lysander Kemp, 1967)

11. Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita (Michael Glenny, 1969)

12. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 100 Years of Solitude (Gregory Rabassa, 1970)

13. Walter Benjamin – Illuminations (Harry Zohn, 1970)

14. Paul Celan – Poems (Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton, 1972)

15. Bertolt Brecht – Poems (John Willett, Ralph Manheim, Erich Fried, et al 1976)

16. Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish (Alan Sheridan, 1977)

17. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie - Montaillou (Barbara Bray, 1978)

18. Italo Calvino – If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (William Weaver, 1981)

19. Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida (Richard Howard, 1981)

20. Christa Wolf – A Model Childhood (Ursule Molinaro, Hedwig Rappolt, 1982)

21. Umberto Eco – The Name of the Rose (William Weaver, 1983)

22. Mario Vargas Llosa – Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Helen R. Lane, 1983)

23. Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Michael Henry Heim, 1984)

24. Marguerite Duras – The Lover (Barbara Bray, 1985)

25. Josef Skvorecky – The Engineer of Human Souls (Paul Wilson, 1985)

26. Per Olov Enquist – The March of the Musicians (Joan Tate, 1985)

27. Patrick Süskind – Perfume (John E. Woods, 1986)

28. Isabel Allende – The House of the Spirits (Magda Bodin, 1986)

29. Georges Perec – Life A User’s Manual (David Bellos, 1987)

30. Thomas Bernhard – Cutting Timber (Ewald Osers, 1988)

31. Czeslaw Milosz – Poems (Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Hass, 1988)

32. José Saramago – Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (Giovanni Pontiero, 1992)

33. Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time (Terence Kilmartin, 1992)

34. Roberto Calasso – The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (Tim Parks, 1993)

35. Naguib Mahfouz – Cairo Trilogy (Olive E. Kenny, Lorne M. Kenny, Angela Botros Samaan, 1991-3)

36. Laura Esquivel – Like Water for Chocolate (Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen, 1993)

37. Bao Ninh – The Sorrow of War (Frank Palmos, Phan Thanh Hao, 1994)

38. Victor Klemperer – I Shall Bear Witness (Martin Chalmers, 1998)

39. Beowulf (Seamus Heaney, 1999)

40. Josef Brodsky – Collected Poems (Anthony Hecht et al, 2000)

41. Xingjian Gao – Soul Mountain (Mabel Lee, 2001)

42. Tahar Ben Jelloun – This Blinding Absence of Light (Linda Coverdale, 2002)

43. W.G. Sebald – Austerlitz (Anthea Bell, 2002)

44. Orhan Pamuk – Snow (Maureen Freely, 2004)

45. Amos Oz – A Tale of Love and Darkness (Nicholas de Lange, 2004)

46. Per Petterson – Out Stealing Horses (Ann Born, 2005)

47. Irène Némirovsky – Suite Française (Sandra Smith, 2006)

48. Vassily Grossman – Life and Fate (Robert Chandler, 2006)

49. Alaa Al Aswany – The Yacoubian Building (Humphrey Davies, 2007)

50. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace (Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky, 2007)

The list contains some of my favourite books (e.g. Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being for example, Gunther Grass' The Tin Drum), as well as a few I started but didn't finish (e.g the Calvino - why read on once you've got the joke? Eco's The Name of the Rose which I couldn't get into despite loving the film, and Xingjian Gao's Soul Mountain which was one of the worst reading experiences of my entire life!)

But the list shows up a lot more "potholes" in my reading and a gentle nudge in the right direction is always a good thing!

What titles would you like to see added or subtracted?

(Incidentally, did anyone else notice that Naguib Mafouz's Cairo Trilogy appears twice on the list in different translations?)

*(I took this list from the Times because their link was down.)

Complete Surrender

Real life has the habit of being stranger than fiction, and this is nowhere more convincingly confirmed than with the story of how Ian McEwan discovered that he had a brother he had never known about.

But it was really Dave Sharpe's story to tell, and tell it he has, in a (ghost written) memoir Complete Surrender, due to be launched if a few day's time.

McEwan's foreword for the book, which can be read on the Guardian website, is a most moving essay about how his brother's illegitimate birth and handing over to strangers on a railway platform has forced a painful reevaluation of family history, and of parents who almost certainly carried the pain of the lost child (whose existence they never acknowledged) to the end of their days.

KL Fringe Festival

Oops! Forgot to put up this note for the KL Fringe Festival which started yesterday and runs to 27th July, incorporating some very interesting events including creative writing, performance, video and film, visual arts, installations and books. Do check out the programme on Kakiseni, and Zubin Mohamad's festival blog for information about what's on and where.

I was a bit perplexed about the term "fringe festival" because I had always assumed that the term implies a main festival around which other more indie things happen. For some reason I had no idea that there was a main KL Festival going on! (And here too there are several interesting literary events including poetry readings.)

Lonesome Bookseller

How did one of the pillars of civilization come, in only 50 years, to be mostly unwanted?”

writes Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry about used-bookstores.

McMurtry is so passionate about collecting books that he decided to create "a book town" in Archer City, Texas (modeled on the Welsh village of Hay-on-Wye) and opened a used-bookstore called Booked Up which now fills nine buildings. But the business is struggling and this year almost had to close down.

As Diana Lynn Ossana notes in her New York Times piece about his latest work Books : A Memoir :

... the colorful characters and frontiers Mr. McMurtry has encountered during his four decades in the antiquarian book trade are disappearing from the American landscape just as much as the vernacular cultures that have occupied his 28 novels. ... he notes that his trade has become a fringe one that makes his neighbors uneasy. Many of the booksellers and scouts he wrangled with and admired are now dead, out of business or marginalized. Their collections now fill Booked Up. The habit they served, reading, is no longer a driving passion for many Americans.

The book though is largely about McMurtry's experiences in the business, and Ossana says is full of "fishing stories" of the rare books caught and those that got away.

I liked this :

Toward the end of the book Mr. McMurtry describes finding a rare copy of “The Whale,” as “Moby-Dick” was called in England, apparently the working copy given to a writer named Charles Reade to abridge to a more manageable length. Reade, a contemporary of Melville’s, “was not a man to be intimidated by a mere American classic.” His first stroke is through the opening line: “Call me Ishmael.”

Damn! I've just gone and Amazon 1-clicked it!

Postscript :

See also this USA Today interview with McMurtry [found via] in which he explains why he doesn't sell his own books in the store. (He sounds a bit of a grouch! Does that naturally go with the territory of being a second-hand bookstore owner I wonder?)

Double Preeta

I picked up two magazines today which both contain articles I've written on Preeta Samarasan. And both also have a plenty more great book related stuff to read.

Preeta is cover girl of MPH's Quill magazine (free to cardholders, RM8 to others, at branches of MPH) with a gorgeous portrait photo taken by top New York-based photographer Miriam Berkley who talks about her work and about what makes a great author photo inside.

The piece on Preeta here is an e-mail interview in which I ask her about the starting point of her novel, how far the family in the novel is based on her own (perish the thought!), how doing an MFA helped her and whether writing from outside the country gives her more freedom to write honestly. Do go pick up a copy to find out the answers! Preeta herself writes a very interesting piece - No More Dirty Laundry : In Defence of Fiction.

In other pieces I enjoyed, Chet writes about her "torrid affair with digital books" (!) ; Lydia gives poor, mistreated books a voice; Amir Muhammad (who seems to have the scary ability of getting everywhere these days!) reviews Adibah Amin's Glimpses; Daphne Lee writes about one of my favourite Scottish folk heroes Tam Lin; Yang May Ooi talks about her encounters with British food and Saradha Narayanan talks about hanging up her stethoscope to become an author.

The other magazine is Off the Edge and my piece about Preeta here is a review of Evening is the Whole Day. I am so happy that Jason Tan gave me the space I needed.

There are the usual thought-provoking articles about politics and the arts, and the more literary things include another episode in the life of Kam's Datuk, and the second extract from Kee Thuan Chye's The Swordfish and Then the Concubine, as well as reviews of two recent publications from The Edge Publications, Shape of a Pocket by Jacqueline Anne Surin, and Tipping Points : Viewpoints on the Reasons for and Impact of the March 8 Election Earthquake. Benjamin McKay reviews Shanon Shah's play Air Con.

Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah is the cover boy here, and the subject of a very lengthy interview with Jason. I wonder if he will still be able to mount a challenge for the presidency of UMNO and really hope so.

* (The piece is not online at the moment - but may be later.)

Rushdie Hatrick!

First he won the Booker in 1981.
Then he won, the Booker of Bookers in 1993.
And I've just heard (thanks Eric!) that he's now picked up the Best of Booker.

Congrats Sir Salman on yet another success for Midnight's Children.

(But what won Scott Pack's Alternative Booker? Take a look here.)

ZI Zips In Zestfully

As promised, guest blogged for us by Ezra Zaid of ZI Pulications :

ZI Publications is looking at producing good quality books for the Malaysian audience (surprise, surprise!). Local publishers have an intimate knowledge of its audiences interest towards topics on Malaysia – its politics/current affairs, history, humour, stories, personalities, etc. But, perhaps what hasn’t been happening as much is keeping up with the variety, quality and substance of books that the public deserves (and probably wants, too!).

Books that carry the ZI Publications logo have to be as good (in all aspects: concept, content, artwork, font size, choice of paper, etc) or better even, especially when they stack up right between Obama’s Audacity of Hope and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner - this is the reality of it.

We are looking to produce / currently producing works of Fiction and Non-Fiction, in both English and Bahasa Malaysia. That said, we feel that there is great potential in the Non-Fiction market for both languages, especially for the Malay language audience. Currently, the public doesn’t truly have the option of reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman or Coelho’s The Alchemist in Bahasa Malaysia; so the translation market is something that we’re going into aggressively - to provide current international bestsellers, books with international critical acclaim, and maybe some of the great classics in Bahasa Malaysia. Every other country is doing the same with their national languages, and it is about time we did too.

Expect to find the following titles from us in Bahasa Malaysia:

The Islamist by Ed Husain (Penguin UK)
No God but God by Reza Aslan (Random House)
Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea(Penguin USA)

...and many more to come.

We have other projects/ideas along the way, so stay tuned. Visit us at www.zipublications.com.my and get in touch with us – manuscripts, ideas, comments, opinions, etc., they’re all welcome.

You can also add ZI Publications as a Group on Facebook!

Crap Crit?

John Sutherland on the Guardian blog suggests some reasons why literary criticism is in such a state of decline. (He even goes so far as to call what's left of the savaged Los Angeles Times literary supplement, "crap-crit"!).

The first reason is that, apparently, lit-crit is inherently unsexy :

You can sex up every other section of the paper, but seldom, if ever, the literary pages. And sexy is the flavour of our times.

Secondly, because lit-crit has been ruined by the academics. While they come :

... dirt-cheap. ... They can be dull. Really dull. Increasingly the Great British Public doesn't want a bloody academic review. Sad, but again the spirit of the age.

And thirdly, a lot of reviewing has shifted to the internet and to blogs. Not necessarily a bad thing, but :

One's only reservation is that, writing against the clock, bloggers often write hastily and thoughtlessly. The blogosphere, under pressure, is doing for literary style - the elegance, for example, of a John Carey or an AS Byatt - what texting has done for punctuation.

Now then, I'm not sure why good book-reviews might be considered "un-sexy". But then I'm probably turned on by all the wrong things! The fact is that I really enjoy a well-written review though I tend to seek them out only after I've read the book in question.

No-one wants dull. But academics necessarily don't have to be! A good writer will always remember the audience they are writing for, and if it's a newspaper column for the general public, the piece needs to be entertaining as well as informative, accessible but not dumbed-down. I have really enjoyed some of the pieces written by Prof. Lim Chee Seng in Starmag, for example. Ultimately though it is the editor who is the gatekeeper and must make sure that a dull reviewer doesn't find space on the page.

As for litbloggers not giving the time and attention to a review that would go into a printed piece, I can only talk about this from my own perspective. I'm not at all defensive here, and it's true that sometimes I don't have much time to blog, but want to record something about a book I've read, so I am loath to even call such posts reviews when they are really just a reader's response.

But some of the pieces I post here are also published in newspapers and magazines, and they of course get more time and attention. (Someone is paying for them!) I've also tried to spend more time writing about local books I feel deserve the space, especially if there isn't much chance of them getting a newspaper review. (Having said that, I know I am woefully behind and am very sorry!)

Reviewing properly actually takes time (to read and more often than not reread the book) and a lot of cranking up the old brain. That amount of brain-power exerted in other parts of my life earns me pretty decent money!

But by and large, reviewers here are generally paid very badly (and the payment from one national newspaper has actually gone down by 25% in the time I've been writing for them!). Most folks who write them do it simply for the love of it. They have to.

Talking of reviews though, Amir Muhammad is writing some of the most engaging reviews of locally published books that I have read, in the Malay Mail (the reinvention of the once sleazy tabloid is now complete!) and yesterday he reviewed Sufian Abas' Kasut Biru Rubina very nicely indeed, noting that the collection of stories :

... juxtaposes, with studious glee, the pop-inflected banality of contemporary life with inspired surrealism. Some of the stories are melancholy but most are either macabre or misanthropic; the best combine all three.

You can enjoy all Amir's Pulp Friction columns from past issues here and read more of his literary relates musings here.

Get that Garouda off the Twin Towers!

Farish Noor, surely one of the most influential contemporary thinkers on the political landscape of this country has a new book out this month. Di Balik Malaysia is a collection of his essays translated into Malay. Hopefully this will mean that Farish's writing will reach a much wider local readership.

Most of the pieces appeared previously in English in From Mahajapahit to Puterajaya (Silverfish Books 2005), but there are also three new pieces written specially for the book. The cover illustration by Fahmi Reza is rather lovely too. Very King Kong Indon style. (Click up to full size and admire.)

Being the lazy so-and-so that I am, I've lifted this synopsis from the English version on the Silverfish website :

Washington has fingered Malaysia as a 'Islamic terrorist hub' several times since 9/11. In this second collection of Farish A Noor's commentaries on unfolding developments in Malaysia (which) is nothing if not timely with the current raging debate on the 'clash of civilisations'. By focusing on specific issues and suddenly erupting controversies, of Malay/Muslim nationalism and (what he calls) the rise of Islamic 'religio facism' in Malaysia and Indonesia, he tries to answer the question: how much of this is caused by Western 'meddling', and how much of it is actually home grown? This book is written in "white heat" of someone personally affected by the events, but at the same time Dr Farish A Noor manages to maintain an academic distance required by the scholar he is. A must read for anyone interested in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and religio-fascism in the world today, especially in Malaysia and Indonesia.

I had a breakfast meeting Ezra Zaid of ZI publications (which put out this book) the other day. I tell you the guy is absolutely bursting with ideas for great publishing projects. I'm giving him the space here to tell you more very soon.

Oh, and news about the launch party for this book when I have it.

Writing in Paragraph

We talked some time ago about finding space to write and you talked about writing in cafes, in KLCC park, on stairwells.

Now how about a space specially dedicated to writers? :

... created by writers for writers, with an understanding that writers work best in a quiet, comfortable space away from the hurry and obligation of urban life.

Two New York based creative writing students, Lila Cecil and Joy Parisi :

Tired of slogging it out in jobs they did not have their hearts in and desperate for a quiet place to write and a community of writers similar to the one they had found in graduate school ... decided to open their own writing center.

The end result was Paragraph, a tranquil space which attracts writers in many different genres. There's even a programme of events.

Wish you had a place like this to write ... or do you think it really doesn't matter - like Jean Hannah Eidelstein on the Guardian blog who reckons one shouldn't be so hung up on the space we write in :

... this epic quest for the perfect space, the perfect chair, the perfect room temperature and wallpaper and perfectly chipped mug from which to drink one's perfectly steeped tea while writing has very little to do with the tangible need for surroundings conducive to creativity, and everything to do with the sublimation of writer's block. If the writing is going well, I am sure that I could do it while dangling from ropes off the side of an Alpine rock-face. If it's not, then it is much easier to blame on the state of the café in which I am trying to work - "This espresso is burnt! I can't possibly work under these conditions!" - or, I daresay, the volume of the shoes worn by the person sitting next to me, than on the treacly speed of my brain.

Eidelstein is right, y'know. But I can't help thinking that a writing centre like Paragraph would be just so nice here.

Wordle's Beautiful Word Clouds

I feel terribly guilty in advance. If you check out this website (found via the New York Times Paper Cuts blog) I doubt you will get much work done today.

Wordle generates word clouds from the text you feed in, and then you can play around with colours and fonts and so on.

This is what happened when I fed it a couple of short short stories I'd written. (Click to enlarge and admire fully.) :




You can try it with a whole book. This is Moby Dick :