Kids - Make Your Own Book!

Daphne Lee sent me news of a workshop she's running for kids :

Create a story with words and pictures, and then turn your work into a book!

Daphne Lee, children's and YA literature columnist for The Star will conduct a picture book-making workshop for children age seven to 11.

In this three-day course participants will learn the basics of creative writing; story-illustration; and book-making.

This fun and interesting workshop will arm children with skills that they can use to ... turn their own stories into books; make scrapbooks and photo albums; present school reports in an interesting and eye-catching way.

The workshop costs RM199 per participant.

All materials will be provided.

Dates: Two sessions available:

7th-9th December, 2009

or

18th-20th December, 2009

Time: 10am-Noon

Venue: Learning Works, 74 Jln BU 11/6, Petaling Jaya

Course outline:

Day 1: Create a story
Learn how to create an original story with an interesting plot and characters.

Day 2: Illustrate your story
Learn how to create pictures using pencil, paint, collage and other media to complement and add to your story.

Day 3: Make your book
Turn your words and pictures into a book, and create an eye-catching cover for it.

To reserve a place, please contact Daphne at 016-328 1513 or Eileen at 012 207 2845

For more information email dramprojects@gmail.com or call 016-328 1513

Places are limited so sign up now!

*Sigh* Now why do these nice things always have to be for children?

The Time I Couldn't Make Readings

As most of you know, I couldn't make it to Readings@Seksan on Saturday. I had it all set up and was looking forward to it, but then the dreaded lurgy hit on Friday with symptoms too horrific to speak of. I thought I'd have to cancel the event at the last minute, but then I sent out an SOS via Facebook and friends rallied round to save the day.

Reza came by my house to pick up the sound equipment; Pater Hassan Brown MC-ed; saras and Damyanti organised the drinks; Chet and Leon were there to set up and make sure everything went smoothly. And I'm sure other people lent a hand too. To all of you, a big thank you!

And thanks of course to Seksan for the wonderful space.

I found Leon's photos on Facebook and have put up a few below. Peter sent me this very nice note:

I hope you are better now. I'm afraid I was rather scatter-brained on Saturday and kept forgetting things I should be saying. (Dear Peter, I am always scatty and forget things I should say!) But people were there to prompt me. But it was a fun afternoon, I enjoyed it and I think everyone else did. It was a very 'equal' readings and I thought it was one of the best, although it wasn't the same without you. The Kata Mata group brought along quite a few supporters and they were quite charming, all three that read. The 'Queer' lot were very good too. Jim read a play with an Indian girl he brought along who was a good actress. Pang was very amusing, Cheryl was charismatic and serious and I got along well with Justin who read from a promising sounding novel. So good Saturday afternoon readings once again

But I would like to know more so please if you were there, add anything else you think is interesting in the comments.


Thanks to all who asked, I'm feeling a lot better now.

Just Girls for Short Story Prize

The BBC announced an all-female line-up for its National Short Story Prize :

• Naomi Alderman's Other People's Gods
• Kate Clanchy's The Not-Dead and The Saved
• Sara Maitland's Moss Witch
• Jane Rogers's Hitting Trees with Sticks
• Lionel Shriver's Exchange Rates

Each story will be broadcast, starting December 4th, and you can sign up to be informed when the downloadable podcast is available so you can listen to it on the gadget of your choice.

More at The Guardian.

What's Big and Bad, but Actually Very Good?

It's BookXcess' Big Bad Book Sale, of course!


I was invited along to the preview yesterday, but couldn't make it, so decided to go along today.


It was a very weird Thursday anyway - the traffic was terrible for a weekday, and it took me a while to realise that since tomorrow is Hari Raya Haji and it's school holiday besides, many people had taken time off work to enjoy an extended weekend. A marvellous bit of timing for mad keen book buyers.

(Above - one indulgent dad with a pile of books for his daughter - and there was another full box at this feet!)

When I got to Amcorp Mall, and made my way up to the third floor where the sale was being held (in a huge double shop-lot next to the bookshop), I could not believe the long queue of people waiting to get in to the already packed space. I needed lunch (at my favourite Korean restaurant) before I could even think of braving it.


When I came back much fortified (by kimchi and bulgogi) the queue was gone, but there was scarcely room to move inside. Whoever laments that Malaysians don't read, don't value books, should have seen the heartwarming sight of folks with huge piles and boxes of books.

I really hadn't intended to buy much but soon accumulated a huge bag full of good stuff. The coffee table books were going for RM20, and pretty much all the rest - even hardbacks - for RM8 each. The adult fiction selection wasn't amazing (or maybe all those other eager poeple had beaten me to the best), but I ended up with plenty of non-fiction choices. (My bag full only cost me RM139!)

No matter how hot and uncomfortable it got, or how long the queue for the tills, there was a great feeling of camaraderie among the book lovers. There were new-friends to make along the way, much surrepstitious peeking at other people's book choices.

And of course a few old friends to find. Raja Ahmad is at every cheap book sale I go to!

And Daphne Lee was there too helping out.

I was hot and exhausted by the end, but very happy indeed with my swag. I'm too tired to list everything I bought but might add a note tomorrow.

The sale runs till 2nd December and there's still plenty of good stuff.

Costa Shortlists

The shortlists for the various categories of the Costa Prize have been announced, and here's the full list :

Costa First Novel Award

• The Finest Type of English Womanhood by Rachel Heath
  
• John the Revelator by Peter Murphy
  
• Beauty by Raphael Selbourne
  
• The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw
  

Costa Novel Award

• Family Album by Penelope Lively
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• The Elephant Keeper by Christopher Nicholson
• Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

Costa Biography Award

• The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo
• The Music Room by William Fiennes
• Coda by Simon Gray
• Dancing to the Precipice by Caroline Moorehead

Costa Poetry Award

• Angels Over Elsinore by Clive James
• One Eye'd Leigh by Katharine Kilalea
• Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel
• A Scattering by Christopher Reid

Costa Children's Award

• Solace of the Road by Siobhan Dowd
• Troubadour by Mary Hoffman
• The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness
• Guantanamo Boy by Anna Perera

Two of the authors on the list, Simon Gray and Siobhan Dowd have been nominated posthumously.

More at The Independent, and you can find links to all the nominated books here.

The winners in each category will be announced on January 5th and the overall Book of the Year on January 25th.

Borders Going Belly Up

... if even a chain operation can't compete with Amazon's economies of scale what possible hope can there be for a small independent? How long before they require charitable status to operate at all? ... Since then I've found myself wondering exactly how much of a premium I'd pay to keep that small bookshop in business. Because – all millennial gloom about cultural priorities aside -– it isn't easy to reconcile the book-liking bit of me (which wants a huge range of titles available at really cheap prices) with the bookshop-liking bit of me (which still loves to be surprised by an appetite I didn't know existed)

writes Thomas Sutcliffe in The Independent, responding to the news that Borders in the UK is in deep trouble.

Is this the final chapter for traditional bookshops? asks James Thompson in the same newspaper, pointing out that :

... Borders UK is far from an isolated example of a struggling bookseller. In January 2008, the discount chain The Works went into administration, although it has emerged as a 254-store operation under the ownership of Endless, the Leeds-based private equity group. Even the high-street stalwart Waterstone's, which has more than 300 branches, reported a 3.4 per cent fall in underlying sales for the 18 weeks to 29 August. For a number of years, Britain's bookshops have been haemorrhaging sales to Amazon, the online giant that launched in the UK in 1998, and the supermarkets. They have also suffered from the end of the Harry Potter gravy train in 2007. ... High-street chains now also have to contend with the threat of electronic book readers, most notably Amazon's Kindle device, taking more money away out of their tills. In the wake of Borders UK's troubles, serious questions are again being asked about whether there is a place for traditional shops selling books on our high streets.

Worth reading too about the book trade in Britain is Stuart Jeffries piece on The Guardian blog, which accuses another chain, Waterstones, of killing bookselling. Peter Robins responds to the piece here.

What is apparent is that the business of bookselling - everywhere - is changing drastically and not always in ways that we like. And the future of the trade is beset with uncertainty.

Today I had a very pleasant browse in Borders at The Curve. Hope that our branches of the bookshop (and indeed of all our bookshops) here in Malaysia will manage to survive.

New from Marshall Cavendish

One of the perks of having a book blog is that publishers and authors actually give you copies of books - often with quite overwhelming generosity. I am sorry to be slow about blogging recent additions to my bookshelves and plan to do better. Meanwhile, here are some new reads from Marshall Cavendish, well deserving of your attention :

Chaizani's book - intriguingly called From Out-Er Space - is a collection of well-observed and amusing short pieces by a young woman who lives in Kelantan and hates to be conventional. It's a very chatty enjoyable read. (Note to self, try to get her down to KL for Readings.)

Julian C.H. Lee is an Economic and Social Research Council fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kent, who also lectures at Monash University, Malaysia. His new book The Malaysian Way of Life is a collection of articles on Malaysian culture and politics by a whole range of thought-provoking and entertaining writers, many of them scholars and researchers themselves. Some of the subjects covered include Malaysian food; the Malaysia boleh syndrome; secularism, religion and mysticism in the Malay world; mosque design in Malaysia and Indonesia; Malaysia's own brand of multiculturalism; and Malay language cinema. I think this is a must-read for anyone interested in the country and I can't wait to read it.

Cons, Fools and Friends : 25 Years of Travelling the World records New Zealand photojournalist Peter Anderson's adventures travelling the world. He visits pretty much every corner of the globe in these anecdotes. Among the stories about Malaysia - a taxi driver who didn't want to turn on his windscreen wipers in a rainstorm because he didn't like the noise they made; and an account of a visit to meet a headhunter in Borneo.

This is a perfect book for armchair travellers, but how sad it is that there are so few photos. (To make up for it, do go look at his Flikr photostream.) The author was interviewed in the NST by Suzanne Pillay.

Journalism in Good Faith : Issues and Practices in Religion Reporting by Eric G. Loo and Mustafa K. Anuar is a very useful handbook for journalists and faith-based organisations. It addresses the question of how journalists ethically cover issues of faith when they are trained to report verifiable facts, and looks at how the divide between and withing faith-groups can be bridged.

Lydia Teh also has a new book out called Stretching Your Dollars and $ense which offers 300 money-saving tips. Very good for those who are short of pennies, and thought-provoking for the wasteful rest of us.

Another practical guide, and one that has stood the test of time, is Lee Chew Kang's Grow your Own Vegetables. The book has now been updated and has colour pictures. But I wonder why no mention is made of growing vegetables hydroponically? I will anyway pass on the book to the gardener in the house who is planning to dig up the lawn to plant cabbages.

With so many good books on the market it continues to baffle me why Marshall Cavendish just do not get information about all their books up online. There is no publicity material to link to in most cases. There are no pictures of any of the book covers of the latest crop - and this is most annoying for a blogger and for someone who catalogues their books on LibraryThing. (I've made it a point to say this every time I meet my friends from the publishers at functions, and several times on this blog!)

Moral of story? I can't say strongly enough to local authors to make the effort to put up your own web page or blog, create a fan page on Facebook, and sign up for Twitter. If you don't make the effort to create your own publicity, probably no-one will.

A Hooker Unmasks, A Diva Retires, and A Poet Appropriates

Really, my apologies for not being a very good blogger over the last week or two. I'm not sure what's happened to me, but I seem to be more easily distractible than usual. (I just spent 20 minutes getting distracted by this nice blog while looking to see if I had spelt the word right!).

This being the case, I offer you some quick links to stories that have caught my eye over the last week or two and hope you enjoy them :

Margaret Atwood turned 70 and on The Guardian books blog Daragh McManus celebrates the work of a writer whose versatility astounds. (I am currently reading and relishing After the Flood and reckon it needs to be the second book of a trilogy.)

Zadie Smith suffers from what she calls 'novel nausea' and turns to the essay in a piece that is both erudite and refreshing.

Oprah Winfrey announces that her talk show is coming to an end and Bookninja gets very emotional.

Call-girl blogger Belle De Jour (one of the earliest to be successfully "blooked") reveals her real identity after years of speculation in the press - she's Bristol-based researcher named Dr. Brooke Magnanti and she turned to prostitution to finance her education. (As Rowan Pelling at The Telegraph says, the revelation is shocking because it turns on its head what we think we know about the world's oldest trade.)

I stand behind every word with pride ...

Magnanti says on her blog. A fellow blogger called Darren unearthed her secret way back but - bless him - gave away nothing about:

... the greatest story in the history of blogging, and probably the biggest literary puzzle in the UK this century.

British poet laureate Andrew Motion is accused of "shameless burglary” by a military historian for "extracting sexy soundbites" from his work on military psychiatry. The creation of collages of words - often called found poetry - is though a time-homoured technique. Motion's resulting poem for Armistice Day, An Equal Voice, is far better than the usually trite stuff offered up by laureates on official occasions. But still, the argument raises interesting questions about what plagiarism is and what poets can get away with. (Ellen Whyte tagged me with a link to this article on Facebook, feeling properly angry I think.)

Apologies to those who have asked me to blog this and that. I am slowly sorting myself out and plan to put up some local book news very soon.

November Readings

Catch our next monthly writers event:

Date: 28th November, 2009
Time: 3.30pm
Place: 67, Jalan Tempinis 1, Lucky Garden, Bangsar, KL.

The readers for this month are :

Sui-Jim Ho
Justin Santiago
Cheryl Leong
Steve Oh
Kata.Mata
Pang Khee Teik

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

(For enquiries contact Sharon 017-2644956, sharonbakar@yahoo.com)

Another Year of Bad Sex

Maybe Neil Gaiman got it succinctly right on Twitter a few hours ago :

Just read the Guardian Bad Sex Award contenders ... I may never write a sex scene ever again. O Roth. O Banville. Argh.

Yes, it's that time of year again when literary lust becomes fodder for fun. The Guardian has extracts from all the 2009 nominees for The Literary Review's annual Bad Sex Award which you can read at your peril. But those of you of a somewhat tenderer disposition may want to ignore the link.

(I started down the list earlier but had had a surfeit of fictional bonking before I made it through all the contenders, so will resume later in the interest of - ahem - research. )

My question to you is, do you really think these are examples of bad writing about sex? The Roth extract, green dildo aside (!) i though pretty intriguing and I'm off to buy the book. I didn't snigger pruriently at Banville's :

... tang of fish-slime and sawdust ... .

Theroux's : '

Yoni puja – pray, pray at my portal.

is a rather sweet line I can hear being taken up as a reprise by his female readers and Richard Milward's, yes, IS funny - but that is his intention surely?

The usual refrain on posts of this nature on my blog - sex is very difficult to write well anyway.

Postscript :

And that is the point made very well in Sarah Duncan's response on The Guardian blog :

Writing about sex can be like a complicated game of Twister. You sit in front of your laptop, trying to work out where everything's going. It's worse than following the instructions for assembling flatpack furniture.

Colum McCann Takes NBA Fiction Prize

The National Book Award winners were announced November 18 during a ceremony in New York City. These are probably the major US awards after the Pulitzer Prize, and there are several categories.

The prize for fiction went to Irish author Colum McCann for Let the Great World Spin, which is based on life in New York City in the 1970s. The piece was described as an "indelibly hallucinatory portrait of a decaying city" by judges.

T. J. Stiles wins the non-fiction award for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Keith Waldrop, the poetry award for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy. Phillip Hoose took the Young People's Literature Prize for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.

Gore Vidal wins an award for distinguished contribution to American letters, while Dave Eggars wins the Literian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

This year there was also a bonus prize to mark the awards' 60th anniversary. The public voted online for the Best of the National Book Awards, and the winner was Flannery O'Connor's The Complete Stories. Finalists included books by John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon and Eudora Welty.

You can find interviews with all these authors and information about the books on the NBF website.

Banned Book Probably Wasn't Even Read By Banner!

How can a book be banned - when the Home Minister apparently did not apparently even bother to read it first?

This was the question raised in court yesterday by K. Shanmuga, counsel for Sisters In Islam (SIS) in their judicial review to quash an order banning the book entitled Muslim Women and the Challenges of Islamic Extremism highlighted what he referred to as a decision “clearly lacking in logic” and said, quite rightly :

He must read the book. I can’t think of any other way of banning a book. ... The minister must satisfy himself (before exercising his power), and I submit the only way he can do it is by reading the book.

All this of course begs the question - who is actually ruling the country and making decisions - the elected political representatives (who currently seem gutless) or the Islamicists? (Especially those who would rob women of an opportunity to speak out against injustices in a logical and reasoned manner.)

Ideya Wants Your Creative Writing

I just received this information about another journal you can send your creative work to and affix it below. (Please note that, whenever I post such information, I am only the messenger, and if you have questions or comments, please refer to the organisers.)

IDEYA: JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES Volume 11. Number 2 (March/April 2010).

Special Issue: Contemporary Writing in the Asia-Pacific

Deadline for submission: 10 December 2009

Ideya is a refereed journal publishing both scholarly articles on different fields in the humanities and creative works (poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction).

Ideya was conceived in 1999 to further critical exchange among eminent and upcoming scholars in the fields of humanities in the Philippines and in the Pacific; to disseminate new forms of knowledge about various literary, artistic, and cultural texts in the Philippines and in the southeast Asian region; and to provide an avenue for the publication of the works of established and young creative writers.

Ideya is one of the Philippine journals listed in the MLA International Bibliography.

Members of the editorial advisory board include:
§ Dr. Edith L. Tiempo, National Artist for Literature
§ Dr. Bienvenido Lumbera, National Artist for Literature
§ Dr. Cirilo F. Bautista, Professor Emeritus, De La Salle University
§ Dr. E. San Juan, Jr., Director, Philippines Cultural Studies Center
§ Dr. J. Neil C. Garcia, University of the Philippines-Diliman
§ Dr. Philip Holden, National University of Singapore
§ Dr. Dennis Haskell, The University of Western Australia
§ Dr. Nor Faridah Abdul Manaf, International Islamic University Malaysia

For issue 11.2 (March/April 2010), Ideya is publishing a special issue on creative writing in the Asia-Pacific. Literary works—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and short plays—are accepted and may be in other languages provided the work is accompanied by a translation in either English or Filipino.

Articles on history, criticism, and theory that are related to any field of the humanities will still be considered, though the bulk of the issue will be devoted to creative writing.

All contributions—creative work or research—are blind refereed. Creative works and articles should not exceed 30 typewritten or computer-encoded pages, double-spaced on short bond paper (8.5” x 11”). Scholarly articles should include an abstract and a complete list of works cited using the style prescribed by the Modern Language Association (MLA, 6th ed.).

All contributions should be accompanied by the author's curriculum vitae on a separate electronic file. Contributions can be submitted by email as an MSWord attachment in rich text format (.rtf) or by snail mail in triplicate with an accompanying soft copy in a CD. Deadline for the submission of creative works & articles is 10 December 2009.

Send your contributions to:

Editor, Ideya, Journal of the Humanities
Department of Literature
College of Liberal Arts
De La Salle University
2401 Taft Avenue,
Malate,
Manila 1004
Philippines

or

ideya@dlsu.edu.ph

McCarthy on The Road

There's a fascinating interview with the normally reclusive Cormac McCarthy up at the Wall Street Journal, in which he talks among other things about how he feels about the filming of his novels and how conversations with his 11-year old son, John found their way into The Road. (BTW, if you are thinking that it would be nice to have an autographed copy of the book, the only ones in existence belong to John.)

The film was released a couple of days back, and you can see the trailer here.

Among quotable things McCormac says in the interview :

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It's more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it's just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there's a problem you can take to bed with you at night.

(So as Kim Stanley Robinson said the other day, sci-fi isn't as far removed from out lives as it once was.)

And on the length of books, a warning to writers of would-be mighty tomes :

... the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Moby-Dick," go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

Best Books of the Decade?

The Times featured its The 100 Best Books of the Decade, including both fiction and non-fiction titles.* I guess the titles are arranged in reverse order of wonderfulness - and these are the final five :

5 Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (2006)
Its astonishing rediscovery more than 40 years after Nemirovsky’s death in Auschwitz should not overshadow that the two novellas here are miniature masterpieces. In the first the veneer of civilisation is stripped from a group of Parisians fleeing the advancing Germans, while the second is a moving tale of forbidden love across the divide of war.

4 Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers trans Robert Bringhurst (2002) One hundred years ago Ghandl and Skaay, two great native poets of the northwest coast of Canada, spoke their stories aloud; Bringhurst’s translations and analysis bring a lost world brilliantly to life.

3 Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (2004)
The book that revealed Barack Obama as not just an ambitious politician, but also as an eloquent writer and deep thinker. The fascinating story of his early life, first published in 1995, was reissued in 2004 and became a worldwide bestseller as momentum for the presidency built.

2 Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2003)
With its feisty, irresistible heroine and shapely, naive style, Satrapi’s comic-book account of her childhood during the Islamic Revolution in Iran is hugely enjoyable — and an essential, humanising eye-opener on a little-understood country. From an interview with Oprah Winfrey, 2007

1 The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Cormac McCarthy’s gripping, shattering novel walks in a long line of tradition. Mary Shelley tried her hand at the literature of post-apocalypse with The Last Man, published in 1826; Russell Hoban’s 1980 novel, Riddley Walker, sets the aftermath of doom in Canterbury. The Road’s wilderness — coming to the cinema in January — is an American one: blasted, ruined, destroyed by an unnamed calamity that has scorched the Earth with biblical fury and lit McCarthy’s prose with holy fire. In this awful landscape walk a father and his young son, treading towards a future where it would seem there could be none.

McCarthy has always been a poet of extremity; his earlier novels stripped romance from the myth of the frontier. The Road is stripped back even farther, its father and son the near-sole survivors of what might be called humanity; the book’s narrative is simply that of their survival. There are respites from their suffering —- a cache or two of unspoilted tinned food —- but more often there is horror; this is existence pared to the bone. For this reason, it is McCarthy’s language that must carry the book, and so it does, triumphantly, its Hemingway-like concision shot through with cadences that sometimes recall the sprung rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The Road is our book of the decade; but it will outlast that judgment, too. It is a work of force and dark brilliance, a perfect expression of the early 21st-century’s terrors —- and of the hope we must all have that we shall not destroy ourselves, nor yet be destroyed.

Like all lists it is an Aunt Sally, I suppose, put up to be knocked down, and there is indeed some interesting dissent in the readers' comments. The paper also features a five worst list which makes me sad because I actually really enjoyed Vernon God Little.

Is The Road the book of the decade? For me, I think it could be. I've never been so haunted or disturbed by a work of fiction as I've said before.

Sarah Crowne on The Guardian blog is also in search of readers' choices for the books of the decade, beginning with 2000 (which - help - feels just like yesterday.)

Good Reads has a best of the decade list for fiction based on reader votes.

And no doubt there will be more, and if so, I will update this post later.

But anyway, the important thing is, what do YOU think?

*(Hint - spread over 17 pages this is a tiresome online read, so click the PRINT button and read it from the print preview.)

Nisbo: My Husband's Feline First Wife

Sometimes it is nice to have the chance to write about other stuff than books and author Ellen Whyte gave me the space to guest-blog a post about one of my cats. Find it here.

MPH's Two-Way Tie and Other Stories

I guess most of you had forgotten all about the MPH-Alliance Short Story Competition. After all, the shortlist was revealed way back in July.

Well, the prize-giving was held on Saturday at Subang Parade, and I guess that everyone was surprised because it was a two-way tie between Booker-longlisted author Tan Twan Eng and complete newcomer, Ivan Yeo Mun Kit.

I was one of the six judges for the competition, and let me tell you that there was plenty of lively debate about all the shortlisted stories - but the panel was completely split over which one should win outright, hence the compromise. The sponsors were kind enough to donate one more top of the range laptop, and the prize-money was shared.


Left to right above : Ivan, Twan Eng's mum - Sally Tan, guest Mano Maniam who gave a very good speech on the importance of stories, Datuk Dr. Abdullah b Abdul Rahman, Director of the MPH Group of Companies, runner-up Shih-Li Kow, Zed Adams father (?), and Lee Eeleen. The other runner up, Vincent Foo Hiap Khian, could not attend the event - he lives in Sarawak and we were told that he is over-70. (So -hurray - it isn't just about young writers making a fiction debut.)

Tan Twan Eng's Some Things Will Remain is a heart-stopping drama in which a woman is forced into murder to keep her child, and its terrible climax contrasts sharply with the traquility and beauty of the setting. It asks important questions too about whether such a killing can ever be justified, and whether a person is ever truly able to make amends.

Ivan Yeo Mun Kit is a writer I am sure we will be hearing much more from in future after this promising start. All the judges loved the humour and the carefully observed detail in this story of a young man learning to drive and juggling the relationship with his “not girlfriend”. Ivan has a strong voice and has a great ear for dialogue. His characters were very well drawn. There was some disagreement among the judges about whether we liked the ending though. (But then disagreement is what makes the whole process interesting!)

I won't say any more here about the other stories beyond that I hope these writers will be encouraged to keep writing. (And I hope that others who didn't make the shortlist won't despair, there were some excellent near-misses, and other writers who show a lot of promise.)


The prize for the Teen category which went to the best story on the theme of Staying and Leaving went to Emily Jong. Again, congrats to all prize winners and I hope we are hearing more about you all soon.

It was nice to reconnect with friends at the event. Below is Shih-Li Kow who came with her son Jack, talking to Lim Soon Heng who was one of the judges of the teen prize. I also enjoyed meeting the members of Electric Minds Project, who put on an entertaining and well-acted sketch for us.


The biggest congrats of the day I think must go to MPH for organising this very much needed competition to give local writers something concrete to aim for, and to Alliance Bank for supporting it. I do hope it returns next year!

The World Already IS a Sci-Fi Novel

If you go home, turn on the laptop, the TV – almost anything could be reported. The world has become a science fiction novel, everything's changing so quickly. Science fiction turns out to be the realism of our time, which is very satisfying. ... Depending what we do in next 20 years, it's very hard to be plausible, to say this is what's going to happen. At that point you can't write science fiction, [so] the genre is in a little bit of a crisis, and all the young people are reading fantasy.

Science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson (who you will remember wrote a passionate defense of the genre in New Scientist recently) admits in The Guardian that sci-fi writers can't be prophets in the way they could be in the past and asks :

If the world is a science fiction novel then what do you read? What can the literature do for you?

Robinson's new novel is Gallileo's Dream, described by Alison Flood as :

... on the one hand a scrupulously accurate, joyfully affectionate portrait of the life of the first modern scientist, Galileo Galilei; on the other a wild leap through the solar system to the moons of Jupiter and a future civilisation – Robinson set out to pin down time travel.

I'm in Love With ...

MPH have announced a fun contest for fiction lovers. Tell them about a book you enjoy on YouTube and you stand to win prizes. Find out all about it here.

Augmented Reality at Esquire

Today Esquire magazine, tomorrow the book you're holding?



(Found via Bettina Tizzy on Twitter.)

To Proust or Not to Proust?

As we've seen before, most of us feel some guilt about books we think we should have read (especially if we want to be considered a well-read person) but actually haven't, and probably won't.

Now Germaine Greer in The Guardian absolves us of the need to read Proust. She says of In Search of Lost Time (A la Recherche du Temps Perdu) :

This lacuna in your cultural development you do not need to fill. On the other hand, if you have read all of , you should be very worried about yourself. As Proust very well knew, reading his work for as long as it takes is temps perdu, time wasted, time that would be better spent visiting a demented relative, meditating, walking the dog or learning ancient Greek.

This greatly annoys Agnes Poirier on the blog :

What exactly is the problem with Proust according to Greer? It's too long, apparently, therefore too expensive to acquire, and impossible to read in the bath. Here is literary criticism of the highest nature.

I've not read it. Am daunted by the length. (7 volumes!!!) Would like to at least try it. Every time I find one of the volumes in a warehouse sale it's never the first one so I pass.

Mind you, this comic version looks fun!


What have your experiences of Proust been?

Fragments of Laura

Remember all the hoo-ha about Nabokov wanting the manuscript of his half completed last novel burned and then his son finally deciding to publish it? Now The Original of Laura is to be published worldwide on November 17, and an excerpt is up at The Times.

And what's the verdict on the novel? Publisher's Weekly gets in the first review and notes that :

This very unfinished work reads largely like an outline, full of seeming notes-to-self, references to source material, self-critique, sentence fragments and commentary (“The whole scene was pretty artificial in a fishy theatrical way”). It would be a mistake, in other words, for readers to come to this expecting anything resembling a novel, though the few actual scenes wedged between the notes are unmistakably Nabokovian, with cutting wordplay, piercing description and uneasy-making situations—a character named Hubert H. Hubert molesting a girl, a decaying old man’s strained attempt at perfunctory sex with his younger wife.

It looks then as if it will be of great interest to fans of Nabokov's work, and to scholars, although perhaps not to the general reading public.

Of particular interest is the way Knopf is publishing the book :

... Nabokov’s handwritten index cards are reproduced with a transcription below of each card’s contents, generally less than a paragraph. The scanned index cards (perforated so they can be removed from the book) are what make this book an amazing document; they reveal Nabokov’s neat handwriting (a mix of cursive and print) and his own edits to the text: some lines are blacked out with scribbles, others simply crossed out. Words are inserted, typesetting notes (“no quotes”) and copyedit symbols pepper the writing, and the reverse of many cards bears a wobbly X. Depending on the reader’s eye, the final card in the book is either haunting or the great writer’s final sly wink: it’s a list of synonyms for “efface”—expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out and, finally, obliterate.

Well, Dickens Didn't Do an MA in Creative Writing ...

Are writers born or do they emerge after a year of being 'workshopped' on a creative writing course? There is evidence either way Dickens didn't sit through an MA in the fens, yet the starry alumni graduating from Iowa's Writers' Worshop and the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing MA hint at the fact that writing fiction is not a given birthright, but a learned art.

Arifa Akbar in The Independent looks at the question of whether authors just need solitutde and to get on with it, or whether a formal course in creative writing actually helps. It is a debate that has come up several times before on this blog - and, as we have seen, there are one size fits all answers.

Storyteller on a Train

While I'm always moaning about reading campaigns in Malaysia never really taking off in any way that neither I nor the readers of this blog can see, I really applaud the National Library for its latest initiative.

The Star today reports that 90 children were taken on a four-hour train ride filled with story-telling, reading and singing of folk songs aboard KTM’s Sinaran Pagi as a prelude to the 1Malaysia Reading Campaign. During the journey from KL to Gemas in Negri Sembilan, the kids were entertained by singer Nurul Huda Abdul Wahab and Japanese children’s story-teller Saki Sasamori who has been resident in Malaysia for the past 15 years.

I hope this isn't a one off experiment ... it would be so nice to have to have something like this this continue.

Malaysia's Answer to Harry Potter?

Demand has been so hot for this local series that Popular Bookstores now takes up to 500 copies of its new releases, as opposed to its usual practice of ordering a maximum of 10 copies per title for each outlet....The first batch ordered always exceeds 4,500 copies, and all will be sold within a month. ... To date, the first book titled Seven Days has sold more than 30,000 copies since its release in 2006 – even at the relatively high price of RM20 per copy. ... The success of the series has stunned everyone from writers and editors to publishers, all of whom thought books with 80,000 to 100,000 characters sprawled over 300 pages without illustrations would never get the attention of young readers.

It was so nice to read about the runaway success of a local Chinese children's author, Khor Ewe Pin, in a piece by Yip Yoke Teng in today's Starmag. This teacher and textbook writers says that he noticed that there seemed to be a literary void for older children reading in Chinese. He studied how Rowling's novels were written ... and it seems that some of the magic dust rubbed off on him too.

Reporting From The Front Line

Sorry for not blogging earlier, I was at a place called Frideswide on the Western Front attending to the casualties and dodging fire in the trenches. And I'm only half joking.

Two of my great loves, poetry and Second Life come together with Oxford University's new virtual simulation which places the work of the war poets (including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Vera Brittain and Siegfried Sassoon) in a three dimensional, immersive environment that you can wander through and participate in. You can watch video, listen to readings of the poetry, read facimilies of documents, and watch video as you visit a training camp, communication trench, a casualty clearing station, and a front-line trench. You can wear (if you care to) the uniform of a soldier or nurse, and of course you can pose for and take pictures. I spent a couple of hours there and still have more to see and listen to.

It's a very relevant journey for me, as both my grandfathers fought in the First World War. One talked about the terrible things he'd seen all the time: the other couldn't bring himself to mention it at all.

One thing that made the experience special for me, last night, was having the opportunity to chat to one of the researchers behind the project who was able to explain how everything had come together. (Thanks Skanda!)

You can read all about the project here on Oxford University's website, and find out how you too can visit the battlefield and check out the possibilities of this new and exciting medium. Why Second Life? As the website explains :

Virtual worlds create opportunities to do things that are impossible in real museums. By simulating parts of the Western Front, the archive can embed an entire exhibition's worth of content within in the space. This can be further enhanced by placing digital versions of real archival materials and narratives along the paths that visitors take. The result is an immersive and personal experience. It's not 'real' but it does offer possibilities for understanding a part of history that is now beyond human memory.

The Allah Controversy and the Confiscated Bibles

Malaysia once more hits the world news for all the wrong reasons :

Malaysian authorities have confiscated more than 15,000 Bibles in recent months because they referred to "God" as "Allah," a translation that has been banned in this Muslim-majority country, Christian church officials said Thursday.

This issue about whether Christians are allowed to refer to God as Allah when they use Malay should have been resolved by the courts, but two years later the case brought by The Roman Catholic Church who say the present ruling it is unconstitutional and discriminates against those worshiping in Malay language (i.e the national language, the medium of education!) is still stuck in preliminary hearings for almost two years.

What They Said About the SWF

Zafar Anjum on the Writer's Connect website argues that although the theme for this year's Singapore Writers' Festival was Undercovers, a better word would have been Chaos - not reflecting the organisation of the event - but the fact that so many of the authors (including Mohd Hanif - left) were writing about the world in turmoil :

Throughout the festival, I was looking for one word or one term that could summarize the essence, the zeitgeist of our times. I looked at the books that were there on display in the Arts House bookstore. I tried to listen to the questions that people posed to their favourite writers. What was the gist, what was the spirit, I tried to figure out. ... Looking at the titles on display, one of the themes that strongly emerges is that of political power, violence and tyranny.

The biggest name at the festival as far as most young Singaporeans and Malaysians are concerned was Neil Gaiman. Tickets for the event proved difficult to get hold of and many fans were disappointed. (Okay, maybe here there was some chaos.) Niki Bruce in The Straits times writes about what happened when The Rock Star Writer took to the stage.

I like this :

He (Gaiman) came up with the theory that 'stuffed author' was a secret Singaporean delicacy, where you take "one graying, older author. Feed him wonderful food until he's completely stuffed, and then slice him up into little pick packages".

There's an account of just what one fan went through to get get ticket and attend the events here.

More about the part of the festival I attended later.

And if I find more responses to the festival on any website (surely there must be more out there???) I will post them below them later.

Postscript :

Damyanti writes about some of the sessions and workshops she attended at the festival here.

Quietness

... quietness seems to be the trademark of Guat Eng’s collection of short stories. The click of the computer. The brush of a lace handkerchief against the skin. The ‘soft scrabbling noise and the small chirrup at the window’. Her characters – especially the women – are thoughtful and composed. Thoughtful in their concern for others and thoughtful in that they reflect, ponder and slowly masticate what they take in with eyes and ears. And in the quiet of their own heads, they suture together the disparate snatches of information from their imperfect worlds. Though what they learn or guess at may be shocking and deplorable – the unspoken incest in the story ‘Seventh Uncle’ and ‘Two Pretty Men’, child abuse in ‘The Old House’, infidelity in ‘Almost the Worst Thing’ – they keep these discoveries close to their breasts. And as suddenly as these realizations rise to rage, sadness sways and smothers all. No confrontations. No noise. ... Guat Eng’s fiction captures a cultural suppression that continues to hold true.

There's an excellent piece by SH Lim on the work of Malaysia's first woman novelist in English, Chuah Guat Eng, in Time Out KL October edition. Do go read.

More about Guat on this blog here and her blog is here.

Preeta's Rightful Share

I want to tell you about my friend Kandan. Full name Kandan A/L Palanivel. Twenty years old. Handsome bastard. Of course we men don’t stare at each other and think who’s handsome, who’s ugly, of course not. I’m just saying only. If you had seen him, you also would have said the same thing. We all—me and Kandan and one whole group of fellers—used to lepak at one bhaiyyi coffee shop near KL Sentral there, and even the stylish college girls, the ones from rich-rich families, talking with hell of an American slang and all, used to come and sit with us on Saturday afternoons. Giggling, blinking their big eyes at him like he was God. Even if I strip naked also nobody will look at me like that, I tell you. Fooyoh, terror lah that feller, six feet tall, big shoulders, hair like a TV model, and dunno from where he got brown eyes, almost like mat salleh like that. Next to him Hrithik Roshan also will lose. But he was just a simple boy from Rawang, laborer’s son, never gone anywhere. Cannot even speak English properly.

Okay, go and read the rest of Preeta Samarasan's short story A Rightful Share at online magazine Guernica.

Farish in the Madrasahs

Congratulations to Farish Noor who this week launches his new book Qur'an and Cricket : Travels Through the Madrasahs of Asia and Other Stories at Silverfish.

Catch the event at 7.00pm on Friday, 6th November, 2009 at Silverfish Books, 58-1 Jalan Telawi, Bangsar Baru, Kuala Lumpur. Tel: 448 449 37 Email: info@silverfishbooks.com. Admission: Free

Here is the blurb :

Farish A Noor, academic, activist, traveller extraordinaire, visits, lives and interviews students (and others) in 'jihad factory' madrasahs (Islamic seminaries) from Patani to Pakistan and from Kashmir to Cairo, and comes away dazed and confused. In attempting to make sense of it all, he ends up confronting his own demons and nightmares.

and a taster from the book :

However, in the course of the same research I have also visited some rather dodgy institutions that can hardly be called madrasahs. Once in Pakistan I had to interview some students while in the corner of the room played a videotape of the gruesome murder and decapitation of the American journalist Daniel Pearl. The boys I was speaking to were between seven to ten years of age, and were smiling and laughing -- while others lay asleep. I tried to look away as long as I could, resisting the urge to puke.

Farish is one of my favourite writers. I really value his intelligence, his calm rationality and careful research.

Silverfish was kind enough to send me a copy, and I am really looking forward to reading it.

Au Reveals All!

Au, hero of Katz Tales, speaks. As Au’s language is too sophisticated for some audiences, he allows his personal servant Ellen Whyte to write the columns and the book in her own way.

However, as a rare treat, Au types his own message for Bibliobuli :

Helo reederz. i dont do intervoows ewesualy but as Sharon sends homidge often i haf graceeousli agreed to tak two yoo. And too tipe it myself. There is no need to fank me; just send a rost chikkin.

Sharon aksed me to shair my eksperiences as a faymus kat. Wel, what kan i say? i have always been a top kat so i am used to kontinual adorasyun.

Anyone hoo nos me, howevver, wil tel yoo i am a verry low-key kat. i have just too devoted servants, wun male and wun feemale. They make shure the big grey boks in the kitshun is stakked with treets and the kat biscuit barrel is all ways ful. Wen they perform reely wel i alow them to squizle my chin or play a game. Sum strikter kats wud say i spoil them but what kan i say, i am a just a verry kind kat by nature.

Wen the feemale began witing abowt me, i wuz in two mines.

On the wun paw i pweffer to keep a low pwofile becuz it makes it eazier to katch mice. Also, i don like peeple fawning al over me. i no my beauyooti, wit and grasiousness ar a magnet for the rabble, but al that hommage kan git verry tiring verry quikly.

However, the feemale promissed me that her storees wud enshoor a perminent flow of treetz. She also promissed i wud have to make no pershunal apearanses. Plus, she pointed owt that not evriwun nos what it is like to live with sumone as wunderfool as me. This final point perswayded me.

What the feemale had not mensioned wur the foto shoots.

I wuz verry patient wen she tuk my purrtrait for the buk cuvur but i objekt to those kandid pitshures she splashes al over the place withowt eeven asking my permizion. i meen, how wud yoo feel if sumone fotograffed yoo sleepin and eksposed yoor prozpiroos tummy to the nasion? i am not a poleetiseeyon!

But the feemale has been verry good abowt keeping my fans away. Wen they visit i luk at dem and deeside if they ar worthy of an audienze. Okkasionaly, if their hands ar kleen and they ar properli respektful, i wil alow them to stroke me. i beleef wun must enkorage wuns infeerreeors in everry way, eeven if it meenz sum pershunal sakrifice.

Allso, she has kept me properli suplied with treetz. Wich reminds me: i havent had wun in abowt 20 minootes. Before i go and poot in my order, i wud like to say wun thing: buy the buk! Not only is it filed with wunnerful stories al abowt me but 10% of the feemale’s share wil go to help owt kitties hoo ar living withowt the benefit of pershunal servants.

Bye now. I haf too eet a treet.

Katz Tales, Living Under The Velvet Paw is out in bookshops now. Price RM28 ISBN: 978-967-3035-64-9. For a free sneak peak and free sample story, visit http://www.lepak.com/katztalesbook.html

Two Books for Ellen

One of our featured authors at Readings@Seksan last Saturday has not just one but two titles newly released - both of them with different publishers, and both of them blurbed by me! (Professional!)

Ellen Whyte is someone I wanted very much to meet when I read her Katz Tales columns in The Star and realised that she was as feline crazy as me. And anyone doing PR on behalf of our furry friends, in a country where pets are too often neglected and abandoned, can only be a good thing.

I'm really delighted that she now has out Katz Tales : Under the Velvet Paw (anyone who has been owned by a cat will really appreciate the title!)

To quote myself on the back cover :

Ellen Whyte has the uncanny ability to think herself into the mind of a cat, and writes with great charm while managing to imparting a great deal of practical information. Scoop, Au and Target deserve to be Malaysia's first feline superstars.

I think my words may have gone to Au's head, as you will see later.

The second book Ellen has out is a compilation of her Logomania columns for The Star's Mind Our English page.

Logomania : Where Common Phrases Come From and How to Use Them is published by MPH. And to - ahem - quote myself again :

Logomania is a fascinating and very enjoyable exploration of some of the quirkier phrases in the English language and of the historical circumstances and cultural practices that gave rise to them. Ellen Whyte also provides plenty of examples of the expressions in use so you can comfortably slip these new expressions into everyday conversation.

I have learned a lot about my own language that I didn't know before, and remain fascinated about how the words we use are actually artefacts.

Check out some more of her very readable columns here and here.

Her blog is also a very enjoyable read, and she put up a very useful piece after the publishing symposium we attended in Singapore last week on how to put stuff online without giving your content away. (A problem we are both concerned about.)

Now then, just because I feel naughty, thought I'd put up a pic I took of Ellen and a blow-up doll in Singapore last week. Ellen is the one on the left.