Sufian Sambal and The Art of BiblioStalking

Although he doesn’t write specifically for adolescents, I think Sufian Abas has the sort of weird and wonderful imagination needed to create the sort of romantic fantasies teenagers would be only too eager to lose themselves in. They would most certainly identify with Sufian’s love-sick characters, his delusional young men and wide-eyed young women, all wandering through a world lit by fluorescent strips and filled with dusty roads, stuffy LRT coaches and gaudy fast food joints. ... It’s a world that smells, sweetly and sharply, of rotting garbage and paint-stripper; a world where ceilings leak and the plumbing is jammed with blood and guts and broken hearts. A horrific world, a romantic world, a world swollen with unrequited love and lost dreams. Just the sort of landscape hyper-sensitive, melodramatic young adults like to pretend they inhabit.

Daphne Lee recommends Sufian Abas' new collection Matanya Teleskop, Hatinya Kapal Dalam Botol Kaca (The Eye is a Telescope, the Heart a Ship in a Glass Bottle)* as a teen-read in Starmag today, and says the stories are (and don't you just love this analogy) :

... delicious – like washing down extra spicy sambal with fizzy Fanta orange.

Abby Wong also writes a very enjoyable column about her bookish family. And how important it is to make sure that a future spouse is bookishly compatible!

(Incidentally, on the topic of judging compatability via the bookshelf, you might like to check out Rands in Repose on the topic of being a bookstalker.)
*Available at Silverfish Books, or email Sufian Abas at dvinecomdy@hotmail.com.