Am quite tickled to read that Kosyrev writes for his Russian audience under the pen name Master Chen :... the first Chinese pen-name in Russia ...And it would be rather nice to see this and previous novels (Amalia and the White Apparition, Amalia and the Generalissimo) translated into English and Malay, so I hope those discussions with "a local publisher" go well.
Sharon Bakar. The White Queen is the Queen of Hearts too. How else do you explain the lady patron of this monthly series of readings, adopted from the original Red Queen herself, Ms. Bernice Chauly? Year after year, month by month, I never figure out how Sharon manages to continue to find new writers and old to read their work and secure venues and snacks and chairs and wine and hope for the audience of would-be-writers or poets or musicians or performance artists or burnt-out lawyers or simply editors sweeter than any of their authors may deserve — readers and readers and readers all.(Answer to how I find writers, is by BULLYING people! Haha!)
Everyone who comes comes for the words. ... The words and a sense of community that is casually shaped and fragile and tightly-knit at the same time. I return, after more than a year away, I think, and I still recognise some of the regulars. Chet. Eric C. Forbes. Amir Muhammad. Leon Wing. New faces all the time, which bodes well, but the old faithfuls? I guess this is what keeps “Readings” going. ... The words make a family here you can return to, you vagabond child you.Thanks Kenny and I will get you reading again soon ...
This photo by Lee Pey Huey appeared in The Star a few days back. Wonder what the woman is reading? Must be good.... a behemoth of the bookcase world. Designed by only the fourth employee for Ikea, 41 million have been sold since 1979. The factory where the bookcases are made knocks out 15 Billys a minute; 3.1 million a year.Huma Kureishi in the Guardian's Life and Style section talks about how :
... a Billy bookcase is actually very boring: an unassuming, plain, functional, building-block-style bog-standard bookcaseand the pleasure comes with customising it for yourself. Of course the easiest way to customise a bookcase is - with books. Toman ruminates on one of the questions we love to keep coming back to on this blog - what do your bookshelves say about YOU? And I thought we'd covered every possible way of organising books on bookshelves, but in the comments Laurie of London adds a new one :
I try and leave my books arranged in the order I read them. My bookshelves have now taken on diary-like qualities for me - I can look over them and remember where I was, who I was going out with, or what frame of mind I was in when I read certain books.Sadly though one fact that doesn't get any space in these two pieces is that the factory which has been producing them all this while is about to close. (Lots of photos of Billy bookshelves in use on Flickr.)
... if banned means something like "made dangerous or difficult for the average person to obtain"...since many of the books in question are best sellers, or the work of acclaimed authors and may be available at other libraries and in bookshops, and of course online. But Colleen Mondor of the Chasing Ray blog who points out just why removing a book from the shelf of a school library actually IS a big deal. We in Malaysia can but sigh of course. Our banned books are very banned and theoretically we could be fined or imprisoned for possessing and distributing them. More books never reach out bookstore shelf because someone thinks they are unsuitable for us. Books from overseas sometimes don't reach us (just ask Leon about trying to get his copies of Granta magazine or Dina trying to get medical books on ovarian cysts!). Ignorant people who would never read Rushdie in a hundred years (probably can't read any novels in English anyway) call for all his books to be banned and scream "Don't step on my sensitivities," in lieu of logical discussion. (Hey, I got sensitivities too as a reader!) Good for the ALA opposing and highlighting every instance where a book is challenged : I doubt if we could even keep up if we were to do this here! And half the time we don't even know how hard it is to obtain a title until we try. My friends, we are the ones more in need of a Banned Books Week than the Americans, and I really wish this event were an international one. Erna recently resurrected the Manuscripts Don't Burn blog from its long slumber and I hope this time it is maintained, as it could be a very useful focal point for discussion about the issue. (I found myself a lone voice on the blog with no-one else contributing and have dropped out of it now for good ... but will fight my fight from here, of course.) Sisters in Islam (SIS) have, of course, their own very important battle to fight. Leave has been granted for Judicial Review and the first hearing will be on 28 Oct. Thank you, Postscript : Just opened my e-mail midway through writing this post and found this message from Daphne Lee - talk about timely!! :
Twenty-sixth September saw the start of Banned Books Week in the States. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States. Here in Malaysia, more than 1500 books have been banned between 1971 and 2009. In terms of children's literature, these include books in the Spongebob Squarepants series, Dora’s Fiesta Adventure ActivePoint Book, Poems & Prayers for Children and Read-Aloud Children’s Classics.** The Dram Projects believes in the freedom to read. We also believe in the right to make informed choices when selecting reading material. TDP will be participating in the Right to Read Festival, presented by Sisters in Islam and The Centre for Independent Journalism. Artist/photographer Wei Meng Foo and Daphne Lee (of TDP) will conduct Free2READ, a workshop that introduces children (9-12) to their rights as readers; celebrates the joy and thrill of discovering the different worlds and experiences that lie between the covers of books; and examines the problems and challenges children might encounter in their reading journeys. The workshop participants will be encouraged to discuss and debate the concept of book-banning; invited to question book-banning and challenging policies; and explore their own feelings and thoughts regarding the practice of restricting children's reading material. This will be followed by a bookcover art session with artist/photographer Wei Meng Foo. During this session participants will be invited to exercise their imaginations and creatiivity to produce book covers that celebrate their rights as readers. Date: 10th October, 2009 Time: 10am-1pm Venue: The Annexe, Central Market, Kuala Lumpur Admission: Free Registration: Call Nazreen at 03-7785 6121 -- The Dram Projects 016-328 1513*Found via jelundberg on Twitter. ** Ooops- postscript to a postscript - these children's titles were never "banned" (e.g gazetted) but were, for whatever reasons, seized by JPJ officers. If Munsy is accusing ALA of being sloppy with language, we should take care ourselves.
Sufian Abas (below) turned up with his new protogee, a young poet called Mimi Morticia (above) whose first collection Tangerin & Nicotin (the title is virtually the same in English) he has just published. The official launch is actually today at Central Market Annexxe.
Shanon Shah (below) is an award-winning singer-songwriter, a passionate human-rights advocate (particularly when it comes to issues of gender, sexuality, HIV/AIDS and Islam). He has written for both print and online publications (including The New Straits Times, Kakiseni.com, and Muslim WakeUp.com). He is also a playwright - his debut play Aircon has now had two sell-out runs.
Remember me telling you some time back about the rather "Graham-Greenish" (my desciption, not his) novel Ioannis Gatsiounis was working on? I read a draft of it some time back, and am very happy to learn that in a much trimmed back form it appears as a novella called The Guest House in his new collection of stories Velvet and Cinder Blocks: I'm really looking forward to re-encountering it. Ioannis read us his story The Rat Tooth - extremely good. 
Amir Muhammad, bless him, when he knew that we needed a last minute reader ran off to a nearby cyber-cafe to print off an extract from his new book on Yasmin Ahmad's films to read for us. Although of course the main focus is on the films, I like the fact that the commentary in the side bars takes off in interesting directions.
... zealots and bigots and falseThe American Library Association has also produced this charming video to publicise Banned Books Week :
patriots who live in fear of discourse
You screamers and banners and burners
who would force books off shelves
in your brand of greater good.
The Literary Saloon reminds us that it isn't long before the Nobel Prize in Literature is due to be announced and posts up Ladbrokes' odds for the punters:The top ten betting favorites currently -- keeping Ladbrokes' (mis)spellings* intact -- are:(the full list of all the runners is here).
* Amos Oz 4/1
* Assia Djebar 5/1
* Luis Goytisola 6/1
* Joyce Carol Oates 7/1
* Philip Roth 7/1
* Adonis 8/1
* Antoni Tabucchi 9/1
* Claudio Magris 9/1
* Haruki Murakami 9/1
* Thomas Pynchon 9/1
There are many things I enjoy about my life as a writer. Like any life, it’s filled with profundities and superficialities: I love never, ever having to wake up to the shriek of an alarm clock ever again; I love the fact that the constant reading of good books is a required exercise for the betterment of my craft; I love being able to take a week off whenever I want, while I’m ostensibly “thinking,” and that the act of living is research for what I will one day write. More than anything, I love being able to see how things connect and work out, and seeing my skills grow before my eyes. But like anything, there’s the flip side—I wake up and have to have a tremendous amount of discipline to work and not just watch TV or think of titles for great works I dream of one day writing; I have a hard time reading books for pure enjoyment because I’m either reviewing them or unavoidably studying them for my craft; and I have to work long stretches—weekdays, holidays and weekends—to meet deadlines, or get bits of my work right. As a writer, I have many issues: Am I hamfisted? Am I relevant? Is my work worth reading? Have I lost touch with the world while I was at home sequestered at my desk? Am I pigeonholing myself into an ethnicity? Am I misguided in my experiments and theories about how my fiction works? Should I just quit and do something else? I write to better understand myself and my place in the world, and my writing is an articulation of what I’m working through. Those can’t help but be very private thoughts and ideas, but we write and publish because we have faith that what we’re writing has some value worth sharing. But there’s always that fear that I’m wrong, that I’m just like that guy at a party who is drunk and coked up and insists on telling everyone his great ideas. The search for self-knowledge can’t help but come with self-doubt. The quest for constant improvement can’t help but include growing pains.Eric Forbes interviews 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize-winner Miguel Syjuco about how he finds life as an author; his unconventional début novel Ilustrado (which will be published around the world next Spring), winning the Man Booker, and much more besides. The article appears in the Singapore Writer's Festival edition of Quill magazine, and is very well worth reading. Syjuco will be appearing at the Singapore Writers' Festival (October 24 to November 1, 2009).
This picked up from Amir Muhammad on Facebook, and I thought I'd pass it on here :My book YASMIN AHMAD'S FILMS will be available in November. It's my impressions of watching all 6 of her feature-length films, as well as many commercials, in the month of September. It's not an obituary, neither is it a conventional book of film criticism.
We are currently proofreading the manuscript, and it suddenly occurs to me that it would be nice to have the final pages of the book given over to other people's views. People who have watched and been touched, excited, tickled, by the films. (Think of this as the 'viewer's version' of the coda at the end of MUKHSIN).
So I'd like you to have your say! Please write one sentence on any one of her 6 long films:
- RABUN
- SEPET
- GUBRA
- MUKHSIN
- MUALLAF
- TALENTIME
I think each film will have 1 page, and I will try to cram in as many views as I can. Write about a specific scene, or dialogue, or performance, or the entire film. Write about how it made you feel, or how it related to you, or analyse why it works (or maybe doesn't work) for you.
Some ground rules:
1. The sentence can be in any of the languages used in the films.
2. The sentence should not be more than 20 words. If you are writing in Chinese, then no more than 20 Chinese characters.
3. Send ONLY by email to matahari.books@gmail.com with the heading MY SENTENCE, together with your name and location. Let's make this international!
4. Deadline for submission: 30 September noon (Malaysian time).
5. You can send in more than one sentence, but I will choose one per person.
Due to space constraints, I may not be able to print all the sentences. But here's a hint: try not to pick one of the more 'popular' films, and you might have a better chance lah.
We haven't decided on the retail price of the book yet. But all my writer royalties from the first edition will be donated to the Mercy - Yasmin Ahmad Fund for Children.
A 'teaser' of sorts for the book is my article for the Canadian magazine Cinema Scope here.
* I didn't know what to call this Event on Facebook, but I think Reunion Party works as well as anything else. Yes, use this as a chance to reunite with the films!
regards,
amir.
The art of handwriting teaches us to control our hands and encourages hand-eye coordination.... [it]obliges us to compose the phrase mentally before writing it down. Thanks to the resistance of pen and paper, it does make one slow down and think. Many writers, though accustomed to writing on the computer, would sometimes prefer even to impress letters on a clay tablet, just so they could think with greater calm.A century from now, our handwriting may only be legible to experts.I think handwriting matters too. I write differently when I write by hand. I am more in touch with my feelings. And the feel of a favourite pen flowing over good paper and forming your words is frankly sensuous. What do you think?
British author Simon Van Booy has won the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award for his collection, Love Begins in Winter, the world's richest award for a short story collection.... a majority one, rather than a unanimous one.This is Van Booy’s second collection of stories and his first novel is to be published next year.
While many have made the assumption that today kids can't write because of all the technology they are surrounded with, Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, has discovered from her research that we're probably :... in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization ...according Clive Thompson in Wired magazine :
... technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions. ... It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.Lunsford's team also found that the quality of the writing was high with writers better able to assess their audience :
... adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across.... The fact that students today almost always write for an audience ... gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world.And they apparently didn't find a single instance of text-speak in the writing sampled, putting to rest another myth.
It seems safe to argue that we still don’t know very much about how people are using social media and technology to communicate.
Reading a book by Franz Kafka or watching a film by director David Lynch,could make you smarter, a study by psychologists of the University of California in Santa Barbara have found [via]. This from the press release :As part of their research, Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and the article's second co-author, asked a group of subjects to read an abridged and slightly edited version of Kafka's "The Country Doctor," which involves a nonsensical –– and in some ways disturbing –– series of events. A second group read a different version of the same short story, one that had been rewritten so that the plot and literary elements made sense. The subjects were then asked to complete an artificial-grammar learning task in which they were exposed to hidden patterns in letter strings. They were asked to copy the individual letter strings and then to put a mark next to those that followed a similar pattern. "People who read the nonsensical story checked off more letter strings –– clearly they were motivated to find structure," said Proulx. "But what's more important is that they were actually more accurate than those who read the more normal version of the story. They really did learn the pattern better than the other participants did."I couldn't find the short story online, but it can be found in this volume of Kafkas' collected stories.
Wishing all Muslim friends a very happy Hari Raya, and the rest of you and enjoyable break.... the best British literature of our time.Literary fiction he says, usually turns out to be historical novels (and that is certainly true of most of the books on this year's shortlist) :
... these novels are not about now in the way science fiction is. Thus it seems to me that three or four of the last 10 Booker prizes should have gone to science fiction novels the juries hadn't read. Should I name names? Why not: Air by Geoff Ryman should have won in 2005, Life by Gwyneth Jones in 2004, and Signs of Life by M. John Harrison in 1997. Indeed this year the prize should probably go to a science fiction comedy called Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts.And he throws down this challenge to the magazine's readers (I reckon its one we could all take up) :
Read science fiction, read historical fiction, make your own judgement, and then talk about it. Try this as a kind of experiment: read 30 writers new to you. It's a big project, but what a lot of good reading would come of it. And New Scientist readers will be quickest of all to see that the literature that best expresses our time, that speaks to our time, is science fiction. How could it be otherwise? Our world is a science fiction. ... This is important, because you need the literature of your time. You can't get the meaning of our life in 2009 from historical fiction, nor from science alone. Novels serve us, and are treasured, because we want meaning, and fiction is where meaning is created. Scientifically minded people could perhaps conceptualise novels as case studies or thought experiments, both finer grained and wider ranging in their approach to meaning than cruder genres such as religion, psychology or common sense. A literary life is an ongoing moral education, a complete geography of the human world.Incidentally, New Scientist also announced a Sci-Fi flash fiction competition, and nowhere in the rules does it say that it isn't open to international readers - so go for it.
Congratulations to Azmah Nordin who has been chosen as the Malaysian recipient of the South-East Asian Writers Award (SEA Write Award) 2009. This from The Star today:... the Kulim-born writer was nominated by the DBP through the SEA Write Award selection committee and verified by the SEA Write Award secretariat in Bangkok on Sept 9.Her blog Sastera (meaning literature) is here with many interesting posts on it about the local literary scene.
“Azmah is the 31st recipient of the award since its establishment in 1979. With the award, she will also receive a cash prize of 70,000 baht (RM6,797) and several accompanying gifts,” the statement said.
The award will be presented by Thailand’s Crown Prince, Maha Vajiralongkorn, and his royal consort, Princess Srirasm, at the SEA Write Award 2009 Gala Night scheduled for Oct 9 in Bangkok.
Azmah has written 48 novels, 22 anthologies of short stories and 27 short stories published in magazines since 1985.
Among her popular novels are Noor Ainku Sayang, Pejuang Bawah Bayu, Awang Kirana Mudir Besar, Ribut di Gua Gomantong and Puteri Delima. She has also been honoured with 22 other awards, including the Sabah DBP Literary Award 1998/1999, Malayan Banking Berhad-DBP Award 1991, DBKL-DBP Poetry and Short Stories Award 1990, Malaysian Premier Literary Award 2000/ 2001, and Sabah Literary Award for four consecutive years from 2002 to 2005.
Dr. Emma Dawson "works at the intersection of postcolonial writing, pedagogy and the emergent field of World Englishes literature. Her recent study addressed the teaching of World Englishes literature in schools in England." She is involved in a project which is set to publish 8 anthologies of new writing in English from around the world. Cameroon and Nigeria (Nov 2009) are out, Uganda and Kenya will follow, Malaysia, Singapore, India and a Caribbean nation after that.
Below is a request for submissions from Malaysia and Singapore (There will be two separate anthologies.)
- Word count: 3000 - 8000 words
- There is no theme, only 'Malaysia' or 'Singapore'.
- This is adult fiction (in the sense that it is not 'children's fiction').
- The work must be written in English (i.e. not translated from another language) and must be written by a resident of Malaysia (or Singapore) (this is not a collection of diaspora writing).
- The story must be 'new' in the sense that it is 'unpublished in book form' - this makes life much easier in terms of 'rights'. (We can accept submissions which have been previously published in magazines if necessary.)
- Please send submissions by email to worldlits@googlemail.com, attached as a Microsoft Word document (saved as a 1997-2003 version please) and formatted as follows:
- Name of author (Times New Roman, 12pt, bold, left justified).
- Contact address, telephone number and email (Times New Roman, 12pt, bold, left justified).
- Title of short story (Times New Roman, 14pt, bold, centred, underlined).
- Body text (Times New Roman, 12pt, justified, 1.5 line spacing, black).
- Page numbers and name of author on every page please.
- Word count at the end of the story (Bold, left justified).
Maximum of two entries per person please.
Please submit by January 31st, 2010.
I found Rizal Johan's piece Future Past in today's Star very interesting indeed. He reckons that virtual reality:... is not what was imagined by sci-fi scribes and filmmakers 30 years ago. But the past still holds promise for the future, at least in cinematic terms.He explains :
... there was a time when such a future only existed in the world of fiction. And more often than not, the future was a sinister world. But it was also exciting because the possibility of such a future could be imagined, dreamed and maybe even realised. Celebrated sci-fi author William Gibson stirred the imagination through a series of novels about the virtual and information world in the 1980s. He is responsible for coming up with the term “cyberspace” and fully explored his vision of the future in his debut novel, Neuromancer in 1984. In the novel, Gibson describes cyberspace as being a “consensual hallucination” and is set in a dystopian future of drug addicted computer hackers, genetic engineering, virtual reality, vicious AIs (artificial intelligence) and overpowering multi-national corporations. ... It was a paranoid world on the brink but you met cyberpunks, rogue military agents, and cybernatically enhanced women running in and out of cyberspace in search for the all important grail of information. Such a world was visually glimpsed slightly earlier in 1982 when the dark and dreary (and now classic) sci-fi film Blade Runner hit cinemas that year. Based on the Philip K. Dick book, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? and directed by the visionary Ridley Scott, the vision of a bleak future, the city and its landscape was perfectly realised in this film.
Althought the emphasis of the piece was largely on the realisation of the vision in films, I am surprised though that the article makes no mention of virtual worlds and more specifically of Second Life which was very much influenced by Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (am grateful to Ted Mahsun for telling me this and putting a copy of the book in my hand) and in so many ways has surpassed Stephenson's vision of what was possible.This is just to give you an idea of how volatile writers like myself are and how our minds go tuk-tuk-tuk like fireworks all the time.Singaporean author Catherine Lim is interviewed by Seth Mydans in The International Herald Tribune today in a piece entitled With a Smile, a Writer who Vexes the Men who Run Singapore.
... a leading voice for liberalism.and famously a thorn in the side of Singaporean politicians. (Her latest run-in with Lee Kuan Yew is reported here.) Mydan's piece points out that Singaporean newspapers shy away from publishing some of Lim's more pointed views, and so like all subversives worth their salt she blogs them.
... men and women and ghosts.She's a very gifted raconteur, and I really loved meeting her a couple of year's back at the Ubud Writer's Festival. She appears at the Singapore Writers Festival (24 Oct - 1 November, 2009). And really, we must persuade her up to KL soon.
Two hundred signed copies of the book — said to be the only ones on sale in the world — had not sold out several hours after Waterstone’s opened the doors at its flagship store in Piccadilly, Central London, at 7am.Dan Brown's new book The Lost Symbol was launched today, yet despite the hype hasn't been greeted with Harry Potter type enthusiasm, reports Mary Bowers in The Times. Apparently, about 40 people had queued from before dawn to secure copies of the book, including fans from Pakistan, Denmark and (wait for it) Malaysia.*
Moronic, derivative and clunky in fact everything his fans were hoping for.Random House Australia marked the launch by roping in 40 to read the book from 9am, with the first to finish giving their review to the waiting press at noon. (And the world champion speed reader Anne Jones claimed to have devoured the 506-page novel in just 41 minutes and 55 seconds.)
Tesco was selling 19 copies a minute from displays next to its fruit and vegetables and Asda shifted 18,000 copies by 4pm.
William Boyd talks about double lives and double dealing and his new novel to Christian House in The Independent, and is profiled by Christopher Tayler in The Guardian.Adam Kindred is "a cloud man" with a problem. He is a climatologist who finds himself wanted for the murder of an immunologist he briefly encountered in an Italian restaurant. ... The dead scientist was developing a miracle cure for asthma, a drug that is set to earn his pharmaceutical company untold riches and the secret of which Adam unknowingly possesses. His life spirals out of control as a cast of assassins, river police and corporate flunkies hits his trail.It sounds pretty exciting, doesn't it? You can read the first chapter on the Bloomsbury website.
But to absorb the Malay culture is one thing; to be absorbed into the Malay world is another. As a young man, my father fell in love with a Malay girl but because he refused to become a Muslim, had to give her up and leave his kampong forever, thus cutting himself off from the “mainland” of his childhood. Hearing the story when I was a child, I learned that religion is an ocean that divides the world into islands.Eric Forbes' blog (which I'm daily getting more jealous of, such good stuff does he have up!) features a fascinating essay by Chuah Guat Eng about her cultural roots and what drives her fiction.
What, then, of the 2009 shortlist? At first glance, it breaths the spirit of the 1970s. Fiercely English, it is strongly inclined to the historical narrative. Every one of these books explores the past in some form.Robert McCrum weighs up this year's Booker shortlist in The Observer, and it's very nice of him to consider what we think here in KL, isn't it? (I think we just shrug and say "Fine, just guarantee us some quality reading." You all agree?)
Taking few risks, it offers JM Coetzee and AS Byatt the prospect of a return visit to the winner's podium. In a recession, it's a list that will transmit a warm glow of reassurance into the troubled breasts of nervous UK booksellers. God knows what they will make of it in Beijing or Kuala Lumpur.
Occasionally, as it has every right to do, the prize turns its back on posterity. This year, Booker is in denial, big time.
There hasn’t been a Man Booker shortlist to match this one since 2005, when the shortlisted novelists Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith went on to split the judges so irrevocably that John Banville came out the ultimate winner. ... If the longlist contained the requisite number of outsiders and eccentrics, such as James Lever’s comic novel narrated by Cheeta the Chimp, the shortlist concentrates on quality and seriousnessIn an interesting piece at The Irish Times, Fintan O'Toole, reckons that Irish authors William Trevor, Ed O’Loughlin and Colm TóibÃn didn't make the cut this year because :
The advance word had hinted at a feeling that there have been quite enough Irish winners for the moment, thank you. .... (And also because) Irishness is losing its gloss.So much can be read into a shortlist!
A few days back The American Book Review featured a list of the 100 Best First Lines from Novels, and I tweeted it forward fairly unthinkingly. My fellow Twitter addict and New Straits Times columnist, Umapagan, caught it and mulled it over, and now has come up with a list of titles which he feels to be glaring omissions to the list :I was looking for a quiet place to die.You can find more posts about first lines here. And please do suggest any others you feel are missing!
The Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster
I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water.
Mr. Vertigo, by Paul Auster
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman
In a distant and secondhand set of dimension, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling starmists waver and part...
The Color of Magic, by Terry Pratchett
"They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles."
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz
A secret’s worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.
The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree, Siddhartha, the handsome Brahmin’s son, grew up with his friend Govinda.
Siddharta, by Hermann Hesse
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
... and hands down, what I feel to be, the most perfectly crafted opening sentence in modern literature...
In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon
Uma. :)
Yvonne has lost her hearing and now she faces losing her sight too. She is scheduled for an operation between 1 and 4 December 2009. But of course she has to raise the funds by herself. The cost of surgery is USD44,000 or RM154,770, and the cost of staying in hospital for two weeks is USD915 or RM3219.1. Create a blog entry titled "Meme: Save Yvonne's Sight"Three things I love to see :
2. List three things you love to see. Add in the picture of Yvonne's book cover. The URL is http://www.yvonnefoong.com/images/banner/my-story.jpg
3. End with the line, "Yvonne Foong is in danger of losing her eyesight thanks to neurofibromatosis (NF). Please find out how you can help her by visiting her blog at http://www.yvonnefoong.com.
4. Tag 5 blog friends. Be sure to copy the rules, OK?
5. If you have a Facebook account, please check out Ellen's new invention, a "feme" pronounced FEEM, a meme designed for Facebook here. And if you want to blog about NF, that would be great too!
1. The faces of my loved ones ...The people I'm tagging are my warm and compassionate blogging friends :
2. Cosy bookshops full of fascinating titles to browse.
3. Rainforest trees
What do Winnie The Pooh, Arthur Dent, James Bond and Dracula have in common? Such continuations of the work of popular authors, who have inconveniently interrupted their output by dying, are big business for the literary world these days. Authors are being roped in left, right and centre to continue or complete legacies.I've blogged about Eoin Colfer writing a further installment of The Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Sebastian Faulks continuing the James Bond legacy with in Devil May Care.
And then of course there's Tilly Bagshawe Mistress of The Game follow-up to Sidney Sheldon's Master of the Game.
- jerng - "Frankenstein 2100 by Chuck Pahlaniuk, Wuthuring Heights 2100 by Irvine Welsh".
- Umapagan - "Gatsby. By Michael Chabon."
- yrakab - "Ulysses. By me. But very short one." (Suspect this one a bit tongue in cheek lah)
When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books ...says Cushing Academy headmaster James Tracy. The administration of the 144 year old school, west of Boston, has decided to go entirely bookless, believing that the future of reading is digital.
I'm a tech entrepreneur. I'm more pro-tech than anyone I know. But I see ebooks as a disaster for everything I care about. Crazy?Nope, I don't think so. And a library without physical books really scares me, to be honest.
... my writing, I’d say too, is an extension of the pulpit … it reaches folks who don’t care for organised religion in a different wayNigerian author and Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan is interviewed by Grace Talusan for the Ubud edition of Quill magazine, and the piece is up on Eric's blog. Akpan's short story collection Say You’re One of Them won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Africa). His stories of children caught in dire situations are set in Rwanda, Nigeria, Benin and Ethiopia.
Message from Farish Noor via Facebook :Ok chums, some generous bloke by the name of Amir Muhammad wants to publish the public lectures that I gave at the Central Market Annexe over the year. The book ought to come out by the end of the year and I hope to see you at the launch. In the meantime I'm sending these pics to Amir to brighten up the book a little bit, as apparently my writings are not exciting enough.This is really good news and I'm cheering for both author and publisher. Can't wait for a copy.
Somehow, our forefathers, of various races, knew how to pakat against common enemies, were able to kongsi their resources, and in the process of all that champur became kamcheng with one another. The product of their alliances, friendships and inter-marriages is reflected in the language they have passed on to us. To lose this legacy is to sever a vital connection not only to the historical origins of the Nanyang Chinese, but also to Singapore’s dynamic multicultural past.In this fascinating piece, Singaporean poet and playwright Alfian Sa'at ponders the movement of words from one local language to another.
Another local author deserving a cheer is Ioannis Gatsiounis with his collection of short stories entitled Velvet & Cinder Blocks. (Thank you ZI Publications for sending me a copy!) Here's the blurb :Ioannis Gatsiounis’s debut collection of short stories brilliantly captures the spirit of the individual who struggles to define himself in a world where the idea of identity is both concrete and perpetually fleeting, a world where loyalties, friendships and family ties can alter in an instant. A young painter follows a false prophet deep into a desert. A pious rape victim struggles to see past her faith in the aftermath of a tsunami. A Chinese-American’s Chineseness is put to the test in multi-racial Malaysia. A young Malay caretaker and his lone guest at a remote guest house struggle to find direction and compassion in an era of stark civilisational divides.(Click covers up to size to read.)
With these ten beautifully imagined and decadently engrossing stories, Gatsiounis offers us a timely, penetrating meditation on intimacy, alienation and triumph in the post 9/11 world.
A S Byatt - The Children's BookSays Chair of Judges James Naughtie :
J M Coetzee - Summertime
Adam Foulds - The Quickening Maze
Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall
Simon Mawer - The Glass Room
Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger
We're thrilled to be able to announce such a strong shortlist, so enticing that it will certainly give us a headache when we come to select the winner. The choice will be a difficult one. There is thundering narrative, great inventiveness, poetry and sharp human insight in abundance. ... These are six writers on the top of their form. They've given us great enjoyment already, and it's a measure of our confidence in their books that all of us are looking forward to reading them yet again before we decide on the prizewinner. What more could we ask?What more indeed? It's a formidable list. Coetzee has won twice before for Life & Times of Michael K in 1982, and Disgrace in 1999. Sarah Waters has been shortlisted twice and Hilary mantel previously long-listed,
Always chase your dreams. If you want to be a writer, then don’t get disheartened by the first couple of rejection slips. As I have discovered, it takes just one good agent to help you make your mark in the world. But the important thing is that your product must objectively be good. There are writers, I am sure, who think they have written the next Nobel Prize-winning novel, but maybe the novel is not so good. So get objective advice. Consult your friends, your colleagues, consult those who read books and if they like your book then, I don’t think you should give up, you should keep on trying and I’m sure you will hit the jackpot someday.Slumdog Millionaire author Vikas Swarup gives encouragment to wannabe-published writers and talks about his work in an interview with Deepika Shetty for Quill magazine. It's up on Eric's blog.
A collection of thought-provoking stories about the contemporary Asian family. O Thiam Chin is a promising writer.The book is due to be launched in October, and O (isn't that a great family name for an author!) will be appearing at the Singapore Writers Festival.
There's so much emphasis on literacy these days that I think people have forgotten or overlooked the joy of reading, ie, the simple pleasure of reading or listening to a good story – if they ever knew it in the first place.Where’s the fun gone? asks Daphne Lee in today's Starmag :
It seems to me that many parents want their children to read but they seem to be interested only in the mechanics of reading. They don’t seem to understand that reading to a child will cultivate a love for stories and books, and this might, in turn, encourage a child to want to learn to read.Something that I think very much needs saying, but I wonder if parents are prepared to listen?
