Chimp Longlisted for Booker

The longlist for the 2009 was announced a couple of days back, and contains some names you will recognise for sure :

AS Byatt - The Children's Book

JM Coetzee - Summertime

Adam Foulds - The Quickening Maze

Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man
Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

James Lever - Me Cheeta

Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall

Simon Mawer - The Glass Room

Ed O'Loughlin - Not Untrue & Not Unkind

James Scudamore - Heliopolis

Colm Toibin - Brooklyn

William Trevor - Love and Summer

Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger

So ... 13 titles - a Booker's dozen. A safely literary list. A list of authors who feel to me like old friends and I am already happily anticipating the hours spent in their company.

Coetzee has of course won the Booker twice before, and A.S. Byatt, once. William Trevor has been previously shortlisted four times, Sarah Waters and Colm Toibin twice each, and Hilary Mantel once.

I read Simon Mawar's Mendel's Dwarf, and felt then that he should have received more recognition for his work.

I'm glad that the prize has also highlighted some deserving new (at least to me) names.

But there isn't much of an international showing on the list this year, is there? Where are the Indian authors? And of course, for us in Malaysia, where's our Tash?

Postscript

Booker back in the mainstream says Boyd Tonkin :

After years of praise or blame (according to outlook) about the readiness of the Man Booker Prize panels to flatter and promote the boom in fiction from or about India or Pakistan, this year's judges seem to have declared war on the Subcontinent. ... Yet the relative absence of surprising names, and of independent publishing houses, tells its own story. Since the millennium, with off-the-wall or debutant victors such as DBC Pierre, Yann Martel, Anne Enright and (last year) Adiga, the Man Booker has drifted down the scenic byways of the promising, the untried, the quirky, the left-field. This long-list shoves it back into the mainstream with a vengeance.

There's also a summary of each of the books here.

Burgess in Kuala Kangsar Tour

Thought you might like to see a pic of some of our delegation of members of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and Badan Warisan Malaysia on our trip to Kuala Kangsar yesterday. You might recognise Dr. Rob Spence who came to talk to Malay College Old Boys Association about Burgess last year, and his wife Elaine (in blue at the front). We gave books by, and about, Burgess to the schools as a thankyou for their hospitality. We were really privileged to be allowed to see around the schools - the first MCKK where Burgess taught, and the second the girl's school housed in what used to be King's Pavilion (the old residency) where Anthony Burgess and his wife Lynne lived 1954-6. The two schools are rightfully proud of their traditions, and I hope we have added yet another layer to that by reminding them that a very famous author was connected with the buildings. The teacher at the front in the picture is holding a copy of The Long Day Wanes, the US edition of The Malayan Trilogy which I passed to her (... a bit of informal book-crossing!). The biggest thrill for me was being allowed to go up to the top of the tower of the old residency where there were panoramic views of the forested hills, Perak River, and sultan's palace. This is the very scene that inspired Burgess to start writing about Malaya (just read the opening of the second chapter of Time for a Tiger). And of course, our tour took in all the other famous sites in Kuala Kangsar ... mosque, palaces, oldest rubber tree, cemetaries, Idris club (aka Burgess' Iblis Club), riverside ... Our Badan Warsian members added to our enjoyment significantly, being able to explain about history and architecture and culture much more effectively than yours truly, and I must say a big thank you particularly to Najib Ariffin (who also happened to be a Malay College old boy) for his entertaining and informative commentary on the coach. Thanks too to my former student Hasnul Ariffin, who present a spectacular time-lapse photograph of Malay College Big School to the IABF taken to mark the centenary of the school. Thank you to everyone who helped to make our trip a big success. Next - (and I am quite serious here) going to work on a Perak literary tour taking in Ipoh and other places and focusing on more contemporary literature!

BiblioTour Guide

Apologies in advance for not blogging much over the next day or two. The International Anthony Burgess Sympozium starts tomorrow at the Istana Hotel. I am so excited that the event has come to Malaysia (as a result of the success of our Burgess evening last year).

I have the chance to play tour guide on Wednesday for a trip to Kuala Kangsar. The delegates have come from around the world and we will be joined by members of Badan Warisan Malaysia.

We'll be visiting both Malay College where Burgess taught (as Mr. J.B. Wilson) and SMK Raja Perumpuan Kalsom which is housed in the old Residency building, better known as King's Pavilion when it was Malay College's prep school. It was here that Burgess lived with his wife Lynn, and wrote Time for a Tiger, the first part of The Malayan Trilogy.

Besides the literary hagiography (!) we will also do the usual Kuala Kangsar sights - the Ubudiah Mosque and the plethora or palaces around Bukit Chandan. If you don't know the town, do go take a trip up there some time. It's probably the prettiest Malaysian town, with plenty of historical stuff to explore.

So if there's nothing much new on the blog for a while, panic not. There are sure to be adventures to be written up.

Amanda at Times with Diamonds

Over ten years ago, Amanda sat on a plane for Bangkok, on the way to her Times grandmother's cremation. She had not been back since childhood and she finds the city of her youth is disappearing...

Author Amanda Kovattana will be talking about her new memoir at Times Bookstore at Pavilion KL, this Friday (31st) 4-6p.m.

According to the blurb on Horizon's website Diamonds in My Pocket is a her story of growing up:

Only child of a beautiful blond English expatriate and the brilliant scion of an upper class Thai family, Amanda Kovattana came of age in the long-vanished world of aristocratic Bangkok. In this exquisitely-rendered memoir, Kovattana produces a chiaroscuro canvas full of sights and sounds and smells, of daily lives textured by honor and tradition, of a family ruptured by deceit and jealousy. Caught in a web of tensions between her mother and father, between East and West, the Old World and the New, the author finally uncovers the long-buried secrets of her own soul.

The author describes herself on her blog as :

... a free range writer who offers fresh, organically grown perspectives while cultivating a fruitful living as a professional organizer. She was born in England, raised in Bangkok and lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

For the upcoming talk, Amanda shares her thoughts about identity and the tension between the individual and society (two of the underlying themes of Diamonds in My Pocket). She will talk about the experience of growing up in a third culture—an experience many Malaysians are familiar with. And there will be a Q&A session after the talk.

Quite apart from being interested in Amanda the author, I think I desperately need to hire her personal services!

(Thanks Han for the invitation to the event via Facebook.)

BookCrossing Liz

Caving Liz whose intrepid exploits lead her to clamber up topographical features and spelunk down into the bowls of the earth, makes an earthshattering new discovery at I Utama : there's an official BookCrossing zone!

It's located on the ground floor outside Parkson and MPH are sponsoring 50 free books a month. But of course, the whole point of BookCrossing is to release some of your own books, so that readers can enjoy them. Here's more about it on the 1Utama website.

Liz says :

There is a small book case and a lounge area for people to sit and read - although the people I saw there were just using the seats for a rest or to read the newspaper!

It will be very interesting to see how the scheme works out. I've crossed quite a few books in the past but find the person who picks them up doesn't tend to play fair and pass them on, which is a bit disappointing because it's nice to see how far books travel and what happens to them on their journey.



Here's an article about the BookCrossing Zone from The Star.

Goodbye Yasmin

you mustn't be afraid of death
you're a deathless soul
you can't be kept in a dark grave
you're filled with God's glow

Rumi

My heart breaks today at hearing that Yasmin Ahmad passed away last night. I did not know her well personally but like many people reading this - I felt that I close to her through her films and writings.

She was a truly beautiful individual, a speaker of the common sense that needed to be spoken, and an award-winning filmmaker of immense talent. She portrayed with great warmth a multi-lingual, multi-racial Malaysia in her work and broke down barriers that hadn't ought to exist but sadly do.

(Here's one of her advertisements, made for the 50th Merdeka Day, showing her work in miniature. If kids can get it right, why can't we? :)



She talked of the need for Malaysians to tell their stories and perhaps that is the best way that we can honour her memory, especially if we can summon the same kind of courage, honesty and love. For although we did not have Yasmin with us for anywhere near long enough, there was so much that she taught us that we carry forward.

Al-Fatihah, Yasmin.

Postscript :

fooie on Yasmin the irreplaceable. Zedeck Siew on Yasmin the Storyteller. Adflin can't believe it.

A Lively Memory

In old age you can close your eyes and summon your youth at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage.

Author of both adult and children's novels, Penelope Lively is interviewed by Sarah Crowne in today's Guardian. Her novel Family Album comes out next month and is described as :

... a sophisticated investigation into the effects of time's passage and the reliability of memory presented in the guise of a minor-key domestic drama.

Fascinated I am, by the way memory is depicted in fiction, so this means the novel is a must-read.

Lively says on the subject :

The idea that memory is linear is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself - can it be linear when all these snatches of other presents exist at once in your mind? A very elusive and tricky concept, time.

And her main character muses :

Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once. The machines of the new technology, I understand, perform in much the same way: all knowledge is stored, to be summoned up at the flick of a key. They sound, in theory, more efficient. Some of my keys don't work; others demand pass-words, codes, random unlocking sequences. The collective past, curiously, provides these. It is public property, but it is also deeply private. We all look differently at it. My Victorians are not your Victorians. My seventeenth century is not yours ... The signals of my own past come from the received past. The lives of others slot into my own life. I, me. Claudia H.

Dipika for Man Asian Literary Prize

The longlist for this year's Man Asian literary prize has been announced and you can find it here, with more information about the award and each of the authors here in the Press Release.

And one of them - Dipika Mukherjee who was nominated for her unpublished novel Thunder Demons - will be appearing at Readings@Seksan tomorrow! Biggest congratulations to her. (And, in fact to all the authors.)

If her name sounds familiar, it may well be that you have come across the two collections of local short stories she edited : The Merlion and The Hibiscus (Penguin 2002) which brought together Malaysian and Singaporean writers, and Silverfish New Writing 6 (p0ssibly the strongest anthology of the series).

Apparently entries for the competition came from Malaysia but none of them made the cut this time. This, though, is the award to aim for if you have a novel in the works. Next year, then. Next year.

Antique Ad

Chet sent me this rather interesting invitation for a very long ago literary event held by Oxford University Press in Kuala Lumpur in the mid-1960's. (She says she found it in the Vol IV, 1965/66 issue of the Journal of the Historical Society, University of Malaya). As she says the Readings @ Seksan's monthly event may have had a predecessor we didn't know about!

Anyone remember these coffee mornings?

Postscript :

Found this account on a forum thread by someone who used to work there :

My very first job in 1964/65 was with Oxford University Press at Loke Yew building in KL. For most of the time I was at their Editorial Department under WM Martin who was the Chief Editor. Raymond Brammah was the big gun who managed OUP in Malaysia and Singapore but he was based in KL. There were rows and rows of books at the OUP showroom in Loke Yew building and even more books at the warehouse in Segambut. Like you I like the feel of books, especially the new ones .... but beware of paper cuts :-) I must have read 90% of the books displayed in the showroom. Most of the books stocked by OUP KL were of course their own publications but they were agents for Faber and a couple of other publishing houses which specialised in children's books.

While there I also had the opportunity to meet famous authors like Han Suyin and Wang Gangwu who came over periodically to discuss the drafts of their ongoing manuscripts. I interviewed Han Suyin for OUP's in-house magazine and one of the things she told me was that the characters in her books were all based on people she knew or met in real life. And she added that if she found me interesting enough, I would probably appear in her next book, "A Mortal Flower" ...... or was it "The Crippled Tree". I read both books and I suppose i did not make it to her "interesting persons list" :-(

I learned a lot at OUP and enjoyed my stint there very much.

Postscript (25/7/09):

Oh dear, oh dear. Pity the poor young lady who turned up at Bangunan Loke Yew this morning for this meeting! I felt so guilty as i explained on the phone what the ad was doing on my blog ...

Children's Books Wanted!

From Daphne Lee via Facebook :

Book Haven & The Dram Projects are joining forces to hold a book drive to benefit underprivileged communities.

When: Sunday, 16th August 2009

Where: Meeting Room, Block 150, Villa Flora, Jalan Burhanuddin Helmi, Taman Tun Dr Ismail, 60000 Kuala Lumpur.

Time: 10am-5pm

If you have unused children's books (in English), in excellent condition and suitable for ages 5 to 15, we can give them good homes.

The communities we are helping to build libraries:

1. New Life Care Centre, Port Dickson (a foster-care home)
2. Baitul Izzah Orphanage, Pinngir TTDI
3. Zomi & Zophie (Myanmarese) Refugee Schools
4. Chin (Myanmarese) Refugee School
5. YKPM in Prima Selayang, an NGO for the urban poor.

The Dram Projects will also be fundraising for its reading initiatives by selling 2nd hand and nearly-new books.

If you or your friends wish to donate children's books (towards building libraries) or books for mature readers (for The Dram Projects' sale), please let us know. We can even come to pick the books up.

Jeff Cheah
012-3152778
bookhaven2008@gmail.com
bookhavenlibrary.blogspot.com

Daphne Lee
016-3281513
dramprojects@gmail.com
dramprojects.wordpress.com

The Dram Projects will also be announcing the outcome of its recent RM1-a-Day fundraiser on 16th August.

A Novelist Is ...

A novelist is someone who remembers nothing yet records and manipulates different versions of what he doesn’t remember.

The novelist is less interested in the exact nature of that truth, more in the nature of the believers, the manner in which they hold their beliefs, and the texture of the ground between competing narratives.

Julian Barnes – Nothing to Be Frightened Of pp 240, 243

(Thanks PPDD for emailing the quotes.)

Guide to Arranging Your Bookshelves

I have a friend who arranges his books generically, with each genre bleeding into the next – science into SF; history into historical fiction. It took him days, but he was a happy man by the end of it. In Jonathan Safran Foer's novel, Everything is Illuminated, a girl derides her lover for ordering his books by colour ("How stupid") – but the system retains a small but passionate following. One colleague orders her books according to which authors she feels would be friends in real life – regardless of the centuries that separate them. ... Myself, after a lifetime of experimentation, I find I prefer the fortuities and disjunctions that arise from eschewing arrangement altogether: my books end up on my shelves according to where I can jam them, which has the advantage of cutting down on random acts of borrowing, as only I know where anything is located.

Sarah Crowne considers bookshelf etiquette on The Guardian blog. It's a topic I love and have visited before (e.g.) but never tire of. And John Crace suggests some alternative ways to organise your shelves to express your personality including :

• The literary snob

Old Penguins, heavily creased to denote re-reading, are lined up in rows of orange, black and grey. These can be bought by the yard at most secondhand bookshops, and are a very easy way of acquiring instant intellectual credibility.

• The 'I'm desperate for a shag', male version

Must include prominent copies of The Golden Notebook and The Second Sex and any dreary rubbish by Ian McEwan lying around to show you are in touch with your sensitive side. Best to hide any well-thumbed copies of Belle du Jour and La Vie Sexuelle by Catherine M under the bed.

• The kleptomaniac

Easy. You just arrange your books in accordance with the numbering system of the library from which you nicked them.

Five Laws of the Novelist

American psychiatrist Stephen Bergman (who writes fiction under the pen name Samuel Shem) contributes an anecdotal piece called Five Laws of the Novelist to The Boston Globe.

I liked this :

Law Four: There Is No Humiliation Beneath Which a Writer Cannot Go. My second novel had come out in paperback, and my wife and I were on a hiking trip in New Hampshire. We stopped in a mom-and-pop store for lunch. There, in a spindle bookrack, were two copies of my novel. I immediately suspected my wife had placed them there, to make me feel good. Nope. I took both books off the rack and went up to the little old lady at the counter, and announced, “I wrote this book.’’

“Oh, you wrote that book?’’ she asked.

I averred yes. I asked if she would like me to sign the copies.

“Oh no, our folks would never buy a book that was writ in.’’

Another standard humiliation: At an author-signing in a bookstore, sitting at a desk near the window, facing a wall of Grishams, watching people hurrying past as if you are a child molester. Not fun, especially if your publisher has overlooked advertising the event.

Also worth reading is his paper Fiction as Resisitance.

Green Teens?

Should teen writers be rushed into print? Imogen Russell Williams on The Guardian blog reckons that although :

...the best writing by children and teenagers can be astonishingly poignant, hilarious, and indeed helpful.

and they should certainly be enouraged, :

In your early teens, you're not necessarily aware of how derivative your literary outpourings are, and the extent to which your reading shapes your writing; and you may not yet be sufficiently master of your own voice ...

One young writer she holds up as an example is Nancy Yi Fan, author of the Swordbird series (with 2 novels under her belt at 15) :

... obviously a very talented teenage writer, but her often infelicitous phrasing ... and the heavy-handedness of her good v evil take on her avian universe suggests that the publisher would have done better to wait for her to mature a little more before rushing her into print.

She also mentions Daisy Ashford wrote The Young Visiters when she was just 9 years old in 1919 (when the novel was published many years later, it went through 18 times in its first year alone) and "the most famous piece of published writing by a young author", Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl.

(She might also have included Christopher Paolini, author of the Brisingr series who is enjoying a great deal of commercial success.)

But with all these younger writers, you find yourself wondering just how they will judge their earlier work when they do reach maturity. Will it be with great pride or toe-curling embarrassment?

Anyway, if you are a teen who wants to write, you might find this list of books compiled Aaron Shepard useful.

McCourt Passes Away

The world lost one extraordinarily gifted and generous soul yesterday.

R.I.P Frank McCourt who passed away, aged 78 in a hospice. He had contracted meningitis, following skin cancer treatment.

McCourt's first book, the brilliant autobiography Angela's Ashes, detailed a miserable childhood growing up impoverished in Ireland and was published when the author was 67. It won him a Pulitzer Prize.

McCourt taught English for much of his life and Eric Konigsberg at The New York Times pays tribute to McCourt the storytelling teacher. (My review of his book Teacher Man is here. )

In The Baltimore Times Paul Golub, now the editorial director of Times Books at New York publisher Henry Holt & Co., recalls his experience of taking McCourt's creative writing course at Stuyvesant in 1979 :

The class was always hilarious and one exercise I remember was McCourt asking us to write about what we had for dinner last night ... He wasn't interested in the typical vague writing but understood that everything was details, details, details -- who bought the chicken, who cooked it, how it was cooked. He would make us read Mimi Sheraton's restaurant reviews in The New York Times so that we could conceive of the idea of writing descriptively about food. It was in Mr. McCourt's class that I first heard that mashed potatoes could be 'satiny.' Before I took Mr. McCourt's class, my writing was very labored. But after he was done with me my writing was fluid and less self-conscious. He liberated me to become myself.

Will append more tributes as they appear in the papers.

Creating Perfume - By the Book!

Bibliophiles - why not buy a perfume that makes you smell like an antique book?

Sonia Ramachnadran writes in the New Straits Times today about about three new perfumes designed for Le Meridien hotel group.

One of the perfumes was inspired by a book. Explains Edouard Roschi (who with Fabrice Penot owns Le Labo, a store that designs custom fragrances):

A book is a symbol of chic, culture and discovery. It could be a photography book about a country or a region or something. Obviously that can be chic and culture intensive. You can learn and discover things from books. If you are curious, you don’t have to travel. Just pick up a book and look at the pictures.

The rich smell of a very old copy Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince (because it was a very French symbol and "about travelling in a very surreal way") was analysed, and ("because the smell of the book was too regressive, too clamouring") amber, vanilla, jasmine and iris were added to the mix to create LM01.

I honestly have to hunt this perfume down!!

Daphne's Storytelling Hints

Daphne Lee held a reading-aloud workshop for volunteers who work with young children last weekend and in today's Starmag offers very useful guidelines for sharing a story with children.

Jane Austen's Monster Mash-Ups

First there was the mashup Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and now Quirk Books proudly introduce Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters written by Ben H. Winters, which grafts together classic novel and horror story.

The new novel, say the publishers, will find the Dashwood sisters tossed from their home and sent to an island of man-eating sea creatures. More about it on The New York Times' blog, and enjoy the trailer below :



Other fun mashup titles suggested by readers :

• A Farewell to Arms and Legs
• The Corpse of Monte Cristo
• As I Lay Bleeding
• Android Karenina
• Portrait of a Werewolf as a Young Man
  
• The Brothers Karazombie
• Uncle Tom’s Coffin
• I Know Why the Caged Zombie Sings
• Tender is the Night of the Living Dead
• Lady Chatterley’s Braaaaaains

Any more to add??

Why does Jane Austen have such enduring appeal?

Claire Harman has just published Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World, reviewed here by John Sutherland.

Asked for her take on the monster mash-ups of Austen's works, Harman replies in The Australian that :

There is a kind of violent desire to go in there and to mess things up a bit.

Outrage and Ouchy Grammar

It's been a day when our minds have been on much more serious things - tragic death (possible murder?) of political aide Teoh Beng Hock, and bombings in Jakarta.

Nevertheless, I had a little outrage left for this reader's letter in The Malay Mail today, asking why Salman Rushdie's books are sold in MPH when :

... they are banned in most Muslim countries.

(Unspecified, of course!!)

The unnamed MPH spokesman gives a very conciliatory answer and passes the buck to distributor Pansing.

If this bloke had wandered into my bookstore, I'd have told him to check in his bigotry and ignorance at the customer service counter. If I were a newspaper editor, I wouldn't have wasted column inches on him.

The fact is Rushdie's books are not banned in Malaysia with the exception of The Satanic Verses (although everyone who wants to read it can easily lay their hands on a copy). There is no earthly reason for them to be.

And the rest of us should stand up firmly against the very suggestion that books should disappear from the shelves.

I'm an extremist? You betcha. But I only read books. I don't plant bombs or throw young men out of windows. (Outrage is better saved for those people.)

As for whether Rushdie's books apart from The Satanic Verses are banned in other countries - I suspect not but I need to dig around to find the actual evidence. And certainly there is a move towards greater tolerance and away from book banning in the UAE [via].

While we're getting angry with things in The Malay Mail, let me ask you (since I feel like playing teacher today) if you can spot the grammar error in this sentence :

A leading light of the abolish English for science and maths campaign has a new book.

The article goes on to talk about how the Higher Education Ministry and the Malaysian National Institute of Translation (MNIT) will hold a road show nationwide to promote A. Samad Said's book, Bisik Warna. The Deputy Higher Education Minister calls it :

...a work of arts (sic) and words from the national laureate on life, organisations, leaders and philosophy ...

The (sic) proving that the journalist who wrote the column can spot someone else's ouchy grammar error, even if they can't see their own.

Congrats to Pak Samad anyway, and it is good to see a book getting so much official support.

How Reading Shaped Aravind Adiga

How could we function without our only common language? Doing away with English seemed to me tantamount to doing away with India: We were the language's, before the language was ours.

Booker winner Aravind Adiga talks about his relationship with the English language and the literature that shaped him, in today's Independent.*

Adiga has a new collection of short fiction out : Between the Assassinations.

*(I have a subtext here for the wannabes - this is how hungry an author needs to be for words, this is how widely you have to read if you want to suceed. The writing of others has to form you, before you in turn have anything to give. *Steps off soapbox*)

Discrimination at the DBP?

This year I am celebrating my tenth anniversary of this so-called war. ... It all began when I submitted a collection of short stories to DBP for publication. The collection comprised stories from ten Malaysian Indian writers including myself. In the foreword I wrote, an editor in DBP wanted to change the word "Bahasa Malaysia" to "Bahasa Melayu". When I still wanted to use the term "Bahasa Malaysia", he started to lecture me that the term doesn’t exist. The matter was even taken up to (prime minister) Datuk Seri Najib Razak who was then the education minister. He made a statement to the press that it was all right to use the term "Bahasa Malaysia". But DBP said it’d only publish the book if I used the term "Bahasa Melayu". In the end, I did not allow the book to be published by DBP.

Uthaya Sankar SB talks to Bissme S in The Sun about non-malay authors writing in Bahasa Malaysia and his run-ins with Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. He puts his finger very nicely on just what is wrong with the organisation :

DBP works at a snail’s pace. Once it does get a manuscript, it can take years to publish it. It’s also an open secret that it does not have a good marketing strategy. DBP should learn from Alaf 21 (a publication house owned by Kumpulan Karangkraf Sdn Bhd). Alaf 21 starts its marketing and publicity drive long before the books hit the market. Publishing books per se is not good enough anymore. You need to promote the books vigorously so readers will pick up the books. You need to make sure the books are available everywhere. But this is not happening in DBP because most of the time, the books are merely available in the Dawama (the marketing and distribution department of DBP) storerooms. Therefore, it is not surprising that (national laureate) Datuk A. Samad Said has taken back the rights to most of his books from DBP and wants to publish under his own publishing house, Wira Bukit Sdn Bhd. Haslina Usman has also done something similar with her father (national laureate) Datuk Usman Awang’s works by taking back all the copyright from DBP and publishing under UA Enterprises Sdn Bhd. DBP is given the task and responsibility to look after our national laureates but it appears it is not doing a good job. The fact that these national laureates do not want to be under DBP’s umbrella doesn’t paint a good picture of DBP. I submitted a letter to DBP recently to officially take back the rights to my books under it. I have no other choice. In 2007, I gave DBP a letter to reprint my books under their publication since there was a demand for my books. But it has not done anything to date. It’s a sad fact that DBP is not proactive. ... Every year, DBP is getting funding from the government to publish a certain number of good quality books. It does not have to generate profit since it relies on the government funding. It feels as long as it publishes books, it has done its job.
... Privatisation is not the answer. It is the mentality of the people involved that should change.

and one hope the right people are reading and will take the comments to heart. Despite the criticisms, he describes his relationship with DBP like that of a father and son.

Another point he makes quite nicely is that* :

So far no non-Malays have made it as sasterawan negara (national laureate) and this proves discrimination exists.*

and he cites the example of poet Dr Lim Swee Tin whom he says is really deserving of the honour ...

Postscript :

(*Apologies - I attributed these words wrongly to Utthaya when these were the words used by the interviewer, Bissme S.)

Amir Takes on Burgess

The Malayan Trilogy is a rambunctious and colourful performance of heat and lust, with the comic bathos of downpours always on hand to quench any potential high-mindedness. It should be made a compulsory text at school, as long as the teachers aren’t prudes who will latah at the lewd words.

Do go read Amir Muhammad's excellent review of Burgess' The Malayan Trilogy which was in The Malay Mail yesterday. it's so good to see the book reaching a new generation of Malaysians and influencing the writing here (both Preeta Samarasan and Shih-Li Kow have named it as one of their favourite reads about the country).

While you're on his blog, do take a look at the other reviews of Malaysian books there including Lethal Lesson and Other Stories by Adeline Lee Zhia Ern, and Adeline Loh's Peeing in the Bush. (Too many Adeline's?!)

The Future of the Book ... is Here

Books in the future will be an experience in cross-media. We need to look to the gaming industry to see a space where people are not constrained by the old forms. Fiction authors will become creators of worlds that readers populate like World of Warcraft.

Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn blog attends attends a talk given by Bob Stein, founder and co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book. She makes a good case for saying that the future that Stein predicts is actually already here.

She lists some of Stein's other thoughts : just ponder the implications :

• Don’t confuse an object with its purpose. The physical book is not its content
• Books are the vehicles that humans use to move ideas around in time and space
• A book is a place where readers (and sometimes authors) congregate
• In non-fiction authors become leaders of communities of enquiry
• Old school authors’ commitment is to engage with subject matter for the benefit of future readers. New school authors engage with readers in the context of subject matter.
• Authors will need to engage with the community around the work they create
• The anxiety about saving a ‘version’ of the content as a printed book will go away. The content will have more of a timeline, a snapshot approach, developing all the time.
• The author will become more like a professor in a class of students. S/he will lead the conversation and point out what may be relevant but the ideas will be in collaboration with the audience/readers.
• Traditional booksellers may be safe in this lifetime, but “your children should go into another career”
• Traditional publishing acts as an intermediary between an author and a reader. Their role in the future will be to build and nurture the community that exists around the author and their work
• E-readers will soon be good enough that they will take off in mainstream. Bob will simultaneously publish his next book in print and ebook formats.
• Print-on-demand is fantastic and will play more of a part as bookstores and publishers go bust

Book Clearance Sale

Times is closing a branch :

- Up to 90% discount
- 3 for RM10
- Daily specials @ RM1
- 11am – 8pm
- 2nd Floor, CapSquare Centre (Map)

+6.017.375.4223

Tasty Authors, Fascinating Food

Can you resist this? From Janet de Neefe :

WRITERS’ & READERS’ MONTH AT CASA LUNA

What’s a writer’s festival without great food?

During the month of October, Casa Luna, one of Bali’s favourite restaurants set in the hillside retreat of Ubud, will honour the homes of the writers appearing at the 2009 Ubud Writers & Readers Festival by featuring their favourite recipes.

From Haiti to Zimbabwe, from coconut to corn, the Casa Luna menu will feature exotic dishes from more than twenty countries that will include Australia, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Italy, Burma, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Haiti, Turkey, Pakistan, Mexico and Nepal. The Casa Luna chefs have been chatting to the writers and gleaning family food secrets and stories that are a valued part in making these treasured dishes.

Leading this year’s Ubud Writers & Readers Festival line-up are Nobel laureates J.M. Coetzee and Wole Soyinka, Vikas Swarup, Fatima Bhutto, Mohammed Hanif, Hari Kunzru, Dany Laferriere, Kate Grenville, Lloyd Jones, Seno Gumira Adjidarma, Sonya Hartnett, Arthur Flowers, Dede Oetomo and Alison Lester.

Its master chef meets masters of pen and prose. Be thrilled by one of the most exciting and eclectic menus you will ever see representing award winning authors, poets and playwrights from all corners of the globe.

Ubud Writers & Readers Festival dates: October 7 – 11.

Contact: Janet DeNeefe janet@ubudwritersfestival.com

Mmmm ... where's the Nigerian food? Can I come along and cook jollof rice?

Rejection Hurts!

Telling those who aren't finalists in the MPH-Alliance Bank Short Story Competition what they already know ... I saved this link up specially.

Rejection affects the human brain in same way as physical pain notes Self Publishing Review [found via Literary Rejections on Display blog - where else?] citing a study by a UCLA-led team of psychologists :

Rejection, a writer’s fate. Whether impecunious and unpublished or Pulitzer-prize winning and flush, the encounter is inescapable. Unless the writer is a “fulltime” masochist (“part-time masochists” are hereby exempted) the meeting is rarely stumbled upon or bumped into. Rather it’s a consequence traceable to the writer’s own exploits. It comes after months of research, followed by years of writing and rewriting. It comes when the pandemic self-doubt that is manifestly rampant in the writer’s head during the writing process, suddenly peters out, shape-shifts, and re-emerges in the form of unrepressed self-esteem. This cryptic and schizophrenic phenomenon occurs in syncopated climax with the writing of the two most mesmeric words in the writer’s lexicon: The End.

And it is in this gluttonous – perchance self-delusional – state that the writer dares to think the work all-out brilliant – surely worthy of representation and publication. So convinced, the intrepid writer takes that fateful flying leap into the duchy of literary agents and publishers – the very locus of the infamous Mr. Rebuffer, and his Gongoresque rejectionists-in-training. The writer includes the compulsory SASE with each manuscript, though certain none will be returned. Then the writer waits. Assuming that the odds of enlisting an agent and getting published are working against the writer, there are two scenarios afoot: Immediate rejection or delayed rejection. Either way, it hurts – literally.

And there are suggestions for accelerating the healing process, which includes the instruction :

Luxuriate in self-pity. (Sad music is an expeditious and freely accessible portico into this seemingly bottomless abyss. Suggestions: ‘Hurt’ by Johnny Cash or Nine Inch Nails. ‘Concrete Angel’ by Martina McBride. ‘Hallelujah’ by Jeff Buckley. ‘Back to Black’ by Amy Winehouse. ‘The Promise’ by Tracy Chapman. ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ by Sinead O’Connor. ‘In the Real World’ by Roy Orbison. ‘Gloomy Sunday’ by Billie Holiday. ‘Drugs Don’t Work’ by The Verve. ‘Lonely Day’ by Systems of a Down. ‘Creep’ by Radiohead.)

The post concludes :

In the end, though physical and emotional pain may technically register through identical mechanism, “rejection” may, in fact, serve the heroic writer well . . . by strengthening both heart . . . and mind.

(Pic from Literary Rejections blog)

MPH-Alliance Short Story Prize Shortlist

The results of the MPH-Alliance Bank National Short Story Prize 2009 are out, although the grand prize winner in each category hasn't been announced yet. (Of course I know, but a herd of wild buffaloes wouldn't drag it out of me.)

This anyway from Eric Forbes blog :

HERE ARE THE WINNERS* Here is the shortlist of the MPH-Alliance Bank National Short Story Prize 2009:

Adults Category

The Cobra’s Mate / Vincent Foo Hiap Khian
Pilling Time / Shih-Li Kow
The Englishman at Table 19’ / Lee Eeleen
The Hunter and the Tigress’ / Zed Adam Idris
Some Things Will Remain’ / Tan Twan Eng
Clutch, Brake, Sellerator / Ivan Yeo Mun Kit

Grand Prize Winner: TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON

Teens Category

Staying and Leaving / Chosita Cheepvasarach
Son of the Jungle / How Han Ming
The Old Man/ Emily Jong Chai Li
The Domino Effect/ Liaw Li Wee
Canned Dreams / Tham Chui-Jun
Complications/ Muhammad Muhaimin Bin Zulkarnain

Congrats to those who won, and a big hug to those who do not see their names here for being courageous enough to send in stories.

Have more to say later.

*Changes made to avoid confusion.

Don't Read These Books!

I've tossed you plenty of lists of must read books. Now how about a list of classics you needn't waste your time with?

In an attempt to save readers valuable reading time when there is so much great stuff out there, The Second Pass lists ten books :

... that will be pressed into your hands by ardent fans. ... Resist them!

is the advice. The books not to read are :

• White Noise by Don DeLillo
• Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
• The USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos
• Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Any list of books is there to be argued with. I'm very glad I've read The Rainbow, The Corrections and A Tale of Two Cities. The Road for all it's faults is a great book. But I reckon (shhhh!) that the writers are right about One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I've read twice without enjoying it.

Others on the list I haven't read, but now I'm curious.

What would you argue with? (You are invited to post your comments here.) What would you like to see join the list?

Social Networking, the Bookstore, and the Bloggers

I have novelist Yang-May Ooi's latest book* in my hand ... but this time it isn't fiction. With co-writer Silvia Cambié, she has written International Communications Strategy : Developments in Cross-Cultural Cummunications and Social Media and is published by Kogan Page. (Listen to the authors talking about how they came to write the book here.) And I got such a surprise when I came to the chapter called Authenticity and Trust, because one of the case studies ... was about MPH Breakfast Club and how it brought together bloggers and writers and bookstore in an extremely positive way, connecting both online and in the real world. (Here's Tang-May's blog entry about the events she took part in.) I love this description of Eric Forbes :

He is clearly regarded as a local expert of publishing, writing and high-quality literature and has become widely known through his blog. In person he is approachable and unpretentious, reflecting the style and tone of his blog ...

Quite! Also mentioned (ahem!) :

Other literary events, such as 'Readings' run by Sharon Bakar, have also been thriving both on the blogs and in other trendy venues around Kuala Lumpur. Would-be writers encourage each other and enterprising young publishers have been forming new imprints to showcase local short stories and essays. many new writers have added their works to the body of Malaysian writing and a few more have been publsihed overseas. ... The key to success has been strong personal networks ... strengthened by the social media.

It's really good when someone recognises what you are doing, as well as the way that a terrific network of encouragment and support exists in KL now. I wonder where Breakfast Club has got to, though? Now that MPH in BV2 has closed, does it still have a home? (*Thanks a lot Yang-May for the copy.)

Are Your Memories Real?

There's a fascinating piece on false memory from Karl Taro Greenfeld in The Washington Post. Did the unforgettable moments of his life - even if they seem entirely real - really happen?

Memory, neuroscientists now believe, is a pattern or grouping of neighboring neurons firing in the brain in reproduction of the initial pattern that fired when the actual experience happened. Each time that experience is recalled, it triggers a similar pattern of neurons, thus strengthening the memory while at the same time altering it; the grouping may lose a few neurons and gain a few new ones. A memory, in other words, is nothing more than a chemical reaction that is subject to the same variations and inconsistencies as any other human endeavor; we can be no more sure of the accuracy of our recollections than we can be of, say, the accuracy of the next foul shot in basketball. A falsehood can be deposited in the brain and reinforced almost as easily as a true-life experience. Memory is fallible, we all acknowledge that, yet a memoirist is expected to report a version that is true to life.

Of course, all this presents many difficulties for the memoirist, and we've seen not a few cases of false memory highlighted in recent years.

Greenfeld's latest memoir is Boy Alone : A Brother's Memoir is about living with an autistic sibling and you can hear more about it in this podcast.

(Thanks, Chet, for the link.)

Writing as Ammunition

The prize... was actually responsible in many ways for my political activism. I won this thing and I was suddenly the darling of the new emerging Indian middle class - they needed a princess. They had the wrong woman. I had this light shining on me at the time, and I knew that I had the stage to say something about what was happening in my country. What is exciting about what I have done since is that writing has become a weapon, some kind of ammunition.

Arundhati Roy talks to Tim Adam's today in The Observer, referring to her Booker win and subsequent shift away from fiction to political polemic. Her new collection of essays : Listening to Grasshoppers : Field Notes on Democracy. (Read some of her work here and here.)

The Author in Her Habitat

I did everything but write in that room ... I paid bills. I printed things out. I sent faxes. I was connected to the Internet. ... The assumption is that writers can write wherever they can sit down ... But the main thing you need as a writer is a sense of certainty that you won’t be interrupted.

Novelist Roxana Robinson, talks about her personal writing space in The New York Times, and explains why she abandoned her book-lined study for a more austere working environment.

And she isn't alone, she says, in seeking a space away from distractions. As she points out :

Raymond Carver ... claimed that he wrote his short stories in the front seat of his car. Ernest Hemingway holed up above a sawmill in Paris. When the essayist Annie Dillard wrote in a college library, she found the comings and goings in the parking lot outside her window so distracting that she drew a sketch of it, closed the Venetian blinds, and taped the sketch onto the blinds.

Many more writers' room at The Guardian.

Let Vikram Twist Your Arm

If you need any more persuasion to go to the Ubud Writers and Readers' Festival this year do have a listen to what Vikram Seth has to say about it!



Early Bird tickets for 4 Day Passes (at 10% off) are available now! Early Bird offer ends 14 July.

Ox-Tale Soup

The charity Oxfam (which also just happens to be Europe's biggest retailer of second-hand books) have teamed up with Profile Books to produce Ox-Tales, four volumes of short stories with contributions from 38 authors.

... inspired by one of the four elements. These roughly correspond with the four main areas of Oxfam's work: conflict resolution (fire), water projects (water), climate change (air) and agricultural development (earth).

William Skidelsky, reviewing the collection in The Observer sees this as yet another sign of the current health of the short story in Britain.

The Independent is running a competition to see if readers can match opening paragraphs with their authors. I say never mind trying to work out the answers - these are great examples of how short stories that we all could learn from. Don't you feel pulled right in?

Thinking Space

Where do you do your best thinking? Gorgeous creative spaces are pictured on a truly amazing three dimensional webpage at The Economist's Thinking Spaces. (Have you seen anything like this before?)

And you are invited to submit a photo of your own room to add to the site.

(Thanks, Umapagan, for the link.)

Singapore Writers' Fest Needs You!

The Singapore Writers' Festival takes place between 24 October to 1 November 2009 at The Arts House, with the theme UNderCovers. The website promises that :

There will be something suitable for everyone whether you love thrillers and mysteries, fairy tales, or enjoy a tale or two about the dark side of the human condition.

And, they will need volunteers for the event :

... to ensure the smooth flow of events and human traffic and that the whole SWF experience is a most comfortable one!

Find out more here!

Shamsiah Fakeh ... At Last

I was very happy today to finally manage to lay my hands on a copy of Shamsiah Fakeh's memoirs in English! (See here and here for earlier posts about the book.)

Here's the cover blurb :

Shamsiah Fakeh was a leader in the independence movement among a group of Malay women who fought persistently right into the jungles of Malaya. She was the head of Angkatan Wanita Sedar (AWAS), which joined forces with Angkatan Pemuda Insaf (API) as flag bearers in the demand for independence from the British. Her collaboration with Ahmad Boestamam, the API head, stoked the spirits of a substantial number of Malayan youths to take up arms against the colonisers. Shamsiah also joined the 10th Regiment, the Malay wing of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Her life was filled with thorny obstacles.

She got lost a few times in the jungle in pursuit of the armed struggle for independence. Her struggle was regardless of place, whether in the jungle or the international arena. She and her husband Ibrahim were sent to China, Indonesia and Vietnam within a framework of inflaming the spirit of nationalism among the people of Southeast Asia who were still colonised then. Shamsiah sacrificed her life and limb to free Malaya through a path that was hers to choose. After she was expelled from the MCP, she stayed on in China and continued her life there working in a ball-bearing factory. She and her family finally returned to Malaysia on 23 July 1994 after the Peace Accords between the MCP and the Malaysian and Thai governments were signed in Haadyai, Thailand, in 1989. Upon her return home, she lived a moderate life in her old age with her children and grandchildren. She never regretted rising against the British and never regretted going into the jungle to join the Communist Party. She was grateful that her struggle had unsettled the colonisers.

She believed and was confident that the young generation who understood the true history of the country would be able to find their direction.

By the way, I bought it in MPH Bangsar Village 1, the larger Bangsar Village 2 branch having mysteriously disappeared. These are hard times for booksellers.

It Was Only Cryptomnesia!

Could some alleged plagiarists be guilty of psychological sloppiness rather than fraud, asks Russ Juskalian in a very interesting piece at Newsweek, but concludes :

Unconscious plagiarism does exist, but writers who don't take proactive steps to avoid it are often either being lazy, or they have a diminished fear of being caught. Driving is a good model: it is easy enough to drift over the speed limit without being aware of it, but vigilant drivers can prevent the habit by forcing themselves to pay conscious attention to the problem. And just as not knowing one's speed won't save one from a ticket, the fact that unconscious plagiarism isn't outright fraud doesn't make "It was cryptomnesia!" much of an excuse. Unconscious plagiarism may not be a "felony," said Schneider, but it's still a journalistic "misdemeanor."

Readers' responses to the article have been compiled here.

Pak Samad and Friends Win the Battle

BM is a language that must be maintained. It is just a matter of getting used to learning it.

Now that the government has decided to revert to the national language for the teaching of Science and Maths, national laureate Datuk A. Samad Said must be feeling pretty pleased that the campaign he supported has been successful. The Malay Mail interviewed him yesterday.

It's a very emotional and complex issue, with much heated debate on both sides, still going on. I wrote about my feelings here, and might well be tempted to write more thoughts on the topic.

Postscript :

Author Robert Raymer wrote an article about the issue for The Borneo Post.

Shining a Flashlight on Good Reads

You know how I love throwing lists of books in your direction? Well, now I think I've found the ultimate book lists website - Flashlight Worthy. Do go check it out - but make sure you have plenty of time first because it will just suck you in for hours!

One of the lists I found today - 33 of the Best Books About Writing Fiction which is based on the recommendations of the finalists of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards competition.

There are lots of fiction lists, and I love the ones that are organised thematically. Novels set in schools, anyone? Glimpses of the afterlife? The Best of P.G. Wodehouse?

You can of course, contribute a list of your own.

The site is partly funded by clicks through to Amazon, and it doesn't take more than a minute to oblige.

Foxy Wena

Wena Poon has just launched a website for her new collection of stories, The Proper Care of Foxes, which is published by Ethos in Singapore. the book will be avaialble from September and will be launched at this year's Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.

Wena Poon’s first book, Lions In Winter, was longlisted for the Irish Frank O’Connor International Award (there was no shortlist) and shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. I do hope that she enjoys similar success with this one.

In a Bind

The Guardian website features a gallery of the finalists of the Designer Bookbinders International Competition. These are covers to swoon over.

When the King of Pop Went Book Shopping

Nancy Bass Wyden at The Huffington Post [via Reading Copy] has the story about the day Michael Jackson went shopping for books and spent $6,000 in the Strand bookstore :

Michael picked out a young Hispanic employee to help him. He had his name, Jesus, written in black magic marker on his plastic oval Strand name tag. I would think this was the thrill of the young man’s life. Michael handed the books that he wanted to buy to Jesus, who then gave it to us in a basket to be sent to the cash register to be added and packed. Occasionally, Michael had requests. He wanted books on black folk music, books by Roald Dahl (including James and the Giant Peach), and something on Versailles. I would send my troops to look for the books and hand the findings to Jesus. On a previous visit, my dad had helped him, and he picked out books on Howard Hughes, dictionaries and first edition children’s books.

The picture is of Jackson, complete with band aids over his botched nose job, in another bookstore in 2007, taken from Mrs. Grapevine. As Reading Copy points out, he must have had some library and I wonder what will happen to it now.

(*I knew I had to squeeze in a reference to Michael Jackson somehow! And yes, I've always been a fan and have happy memories of the KL concert back in the '90's.)

SciFi for Edgehill Prize

iScience-fiction writer Chris Beckett has won The Edge Hill Prize, awarded annually for a single author short story collection by Edge Hill University. Others on the shortlist included Booker winner Anne Enright and Whitbread winner Ali Smith.

You can read an extract from Beckett's collection, The Turing Test here.

Beckett says he was still pinching himself at the win, and added :

I ... thought that being a science fiction writer could count against me: a lot of people don't like it, or look at it in some way as less than literary fiction. It's a little blow for the genre, as well as for me – it might persuade a few people that maybe it's worth looking at.

Judge James Walton said that Beckett's entry had been the most enjoyable and impressive read:

It was Beckett who seemed to us to have written the most imaginative and endlessly inventive stories, fizzing with ideas and complete with strong characters and big contemporary themes. We also appreciated the sheer zest of his storytelling and the obvious pleasure he had taken in creating his fiction.

Psychologically Analysed

As an analyst my effort was always to find the place within myself that could communicate with the other person ... I would try and find the part of me that was furious, or male, or unmarried, or whatever. That has also been the basis for all my characters. They are all based on me - not on my outer life but on elements of my inner life. So that experience of learning to find things within myself has been invaluable.

Sally Vickers in The Guardian on what's she's been able to bring from her first career as a psychotherapist to her second - novelist. Her latest novel is Dancing Backwards.