Singapore Writers' Fest Needs You!

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

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

And, they will need volunteers for the event :

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

Find out more here!

Shamsiah Fakeh ... At Last

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

Here's the cover blurb :

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

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

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

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

It Was Only Cryptomnesia!

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

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

Readers' responses to the article have been compiled here.

Pak Samad and Friends Win the Battle

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

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

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

Postscript :

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

Shining a Flashlight on Good Reads

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

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

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

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

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

Foxy Wena

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

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

In a Bind

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

Complicated, Messy, Human Stuff

I couldn't write about sex at all until after my mother died. Growing up in the 1970s, the official parental line was that nice girls didn't, you know, do it, let alone write about it – although it was a different story for my brothers. Double standards were the order of the day. ... Which meant, in effect, that I was barred from writing fiction. In order to create fully rounded human beings, and describe their relationships with each other, I would have to tackle the subject of sex – along with intimacy, misguided love, death, resentment, friendship, the passion of women for their babies, the problems of marriage and finding the right person, and all the rest of the complicated, messy stuff that humans do. When a parent dies, there is grief, of course, but there is also liberation. You must grow up, and one of the grown-up things I wanted to do was write novels.

Writes novelist Josa Young in The Telegraph, talking about the hangups she had to overcome (This link is specially dedicated to the members of my writing class since writing the steamy stuff it was a topic for discussion last night!)

One interesting aside in the article :

Yesterday, a survey about the reading habits of 2,000 women aged between 45 and 60 reveals that nearly two thirds are keen on raunchy scenes in novels.

How about you? I've added a poll in the sidebar.

When the King of Pop Went Book Shopping

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

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

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

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

SciFi for Edgehill Prize

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

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

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

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

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

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

Psychologically Analysed

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

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

Which of You Beaches is My Mother?

Yesterday it was The Observer's turn to suggest a beach reading list - . Also six writers select the most suitable books to take on any kind of trip.

How about this list of the top 5 airport reads ever? :

The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy (1984)

Cold War thriller much loved by Ronald Reagan, this was the first novel to be published by the US Naval Institute.

Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins (1983)

Sex, scandal and lashings of Hollywood gossip, interspersed with envy-inducing shopping sprees on Rodeo Drive.

Lace by Shirley Conran (1982)

One of the pearls of this gloriously tacky tale of a movie star's search for her roots is the infamous line: 'Which one of you bitches is my mother?'*

Riders by Jilly Cooper (1985)

Show-jumping hero Rupert Campbell-Black set a generation of schoolgirl hearts aflame in vintage Cooper romp.

The Firm by John Grisham (1991)

Rattling account of the shady goings-on at a Memphis law firm that sealed Grisham's reputation. Might well put you off scuba-diving.

*Which translated as "Which of you beeeeeeeeps is my mother?" on Malaysian TV.

Uthaya's New Collection

Another forthcoming book launch, this time of Uthaya Sankar S.B.'s new collection of stories in Bahasa Malaysia : Kathakali.

This event takes place 9:00 - 12:00pm on Sunday, July 12 at the auditorium at the National Library on Jalan Tun Razak, KL.

The book will be launched by the library's director Encik Raslin bin Abu Bakar and will be followed by a discussion about the book buku with Prof Madya Dr Lim Swee Tin.

If you would like to attend RSVP to infokavyan@yahoo.com before 10th July 4p.m.

Inspector Singh Investigates KL

Good writing comes from extensive reading, organised thinking and a willingness to take huge amounts of rejection and criticism on the chin. I think courses, etc., can teach a few skills and develop the confidence of the writer, but the only sure way of developing a unique voice and finding a story to tell is to try and try again—at home, in private, behind closed doors and for long concentrated periods at a time! The real problem is that we do not bring up our children to read and we disdain any subject that is not examinable. I believe that writers emerge from dynamic civil societies where ideas are being exchanged and explored—not from a vacuum!

Eric Forbes has an interview with Shamini Flint up on his blog.

The Malaysian launch of Inspector Singh Investigates will take place 4:30 - 6:30pm on Sunday, July 19 at Alexis (upstairs in the Sino bar), 29a Jalan Telawi 3, Bangsar Baru, KL. Please RSVP via Facebook or contact Shamini directly at shamini@shaminiflint.com.

Postscript :

Here's another invite for you, just come in. (Click up to size.) :

Adeline's Debut

Another of Raman's protogees is interviewed in The New Straits Times today.

Max Koh talks to Adeline Lee Zhia Ern who is just 18 years old and has just publish her first collection of stories, Lethal Lesson And Other Stories, with Silverfish. The book was launched at the bookshops tenth anniversary celebrations last weekend.

It's good to see so much enthusiasm for writing and I hope we hear more of this young lady.

Making Ripples

I approach writing much as I would approach the acquiring of any new skill. Learn the basics, check out what the pros do, practise, get some feedback, then go back through the cycle again. Learn more, read some more, write some more, and try to have some fun along the way.

Frank O'Connor shortlisted author Shih-Li Kow talks to Daphne Lee in Starmag about writing her collection Ripples, and about how she writes and gets her ideas.

And I review the book here. The last line of the review has changed, and I intended it to read :

The best pieces in the collection display Kow as an intelligent and subtle short story writer, with a firm grip on her craft. She is an excellent prose stylist, and there’s a musicality in her writing which makes it seems effortless. Ripples confirms her as one of the best writers in the form in the country, and one feels that the book can stand proudly beside its competitors on the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize shortlist.

A Suitable Sequel

I am so glad I asked Vikram Seth last year at Ubud to write a sequel to A Suitable Boy. I told him that it just wasn't long enough and I wanted more! (And I didn't even resort to any Annie Wilkes like tricks.)

I'm jumping up and down cheering to hear that :

A Suitable Girl will see Lata, the 19-year-old heroine of A Suitable Boy, who suffered the efforts of her mother attempting to find her a suitable husband during the first book, now a grandmother, searching for the right match for her grandson. To be published in the autumn of 2013, publisher Penguin promised that Seth would "bring the action of the narrative up to the present day, encompassing some of the enormous social and economic changes India has undergone in the last 60 years".

A Whale of a Winner

This year's Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction has gone to a book about whales, Philip Hoare's Leviathan which has been described as :

... part natural history, part literary criticism, part economics and part memoir but at its heart is the author's lifelong obsession for all things whale.

Hoare apparently fell in love with whales after reading Moby Dick and first encountered the mammal when he saw a killer whale at Windsor safari park.

The chairman of judges, Jacob Weisberg, said of the book :

The quality of his writing was just so impressive, it is literary, just beautiful. It is a model of a certain kind of writing and I imagine it is a book that will be read for a long time to come.

You can listen to Hoare talking about his book to Claire Amistead here and find an extract here.

Holden Caulfield Stays in Retirement

We've seen before that some authors chose to write a sequel based on an older classic, picking up the characters and taking them off on a new journey.

A Swedish author, Fredrik Colting (writing under the pen name John David California) has written a sequel to J.D. Salinger's 1951 classic The Catcher in the Rye. But it isn't going to be seeing light of day after a judge ruled in favour of Salinger who sued to block publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. Judge Deborah Batts ruled that the main character in was "an infringement" on Salinger's main character, Holden Caulfield.

According to Jennifer Schuessler in The New York Times the book features:

... the ultimate alienated teenager, as a lonely old codger who escapes from a retirement home and his beloved younger sister, Phoebe, as a drug addict sinking into dementia.

The Catcher in the Rye has been a staple of the American high school curriculum over the decades although now it seems the younger generation are finding it harder to relate to Caulfield:

What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as “weird,” “whiny” and “immature.”

I remember reading it decades back and liking it very much, but can't recall much else about it. I am though at the moment reading Salinger's Nine Stories (a copy of which I inherited from Dina Zaman) and am enjoying it thoroughly. (You can read A Perfect Day for Bananafish here - and lazier so and so's can watch the video here. The story blew me away. )

Salinger is now one of the world's more famous recluses, although he is reportedly still writing every day. Maybe one day ...

Twitter Revenge

Your book got a lousy review? Twitter seems to be the tool of choice for hitting back at the reviewer.

Alice Hoffman called Boston Globe critic Roberta Silman a moron for this review (which actually contains plenty that isn't negative!) and demanded to know :

How do some people get to review books? Now any idiot can be a critic.

She then tweeted (is there such a verb, or should that be twote?) Silman's phone number and email address to the world asking her followers to :

... tell her what u think of snarky critics ...

This bordered on harrassment writes Kate Ward at Entertainment Weekly who adds a rather amusing aside :

Thanks to a tipster, we stumbled upon an interview with author Richard Ford, in which he admits to putting a gunshot hole through a book written by a writer who panned one of his books. The reviewer? Alice Hoffman.

UCL's professor of English, John Mullan in The Guardian reckons we can expect more authors sounding off on Twitter because it is a safety valve, but reckons that the best response to a less than good review is a dignified silence. This blogger agrees.

Postscript :

Philip Hensher writes in The Telegraph :

The danger of the internet ... is not so much that anyone can express their opinion – if that is true, everyone is also free to ignore that opinion – but the way it sets a casual statement in stone, and propagates it freely. An author's response to a bad review may be immediate, but the heartfelt expression of your emotional pain is there for as long as anyone chooses to preserve it. ... A comment in conversation, a bad-tempered grunt over breakfast, disappears into thin air; five foul-tempered sentences responding to a blog stay there indefinitely. In former times, what preserved your writing was what came out in hard covers.

Mme Rabotswe Shares Recipes

You've read the books and now cook the food!

Precious Ramotswe, the protagonist of Alexander McCall-Smith's No1 Ladies' Detective Agency series shares her recipes for a whole range of nicely fattening treats to raise money for a range of Botswanan charities.

The book Mma Ramotswe's Cookbook will be published by Polygon in November and is the brain child of charity worker Stuart Brown, and McCall-Smith said he is delighted with it.

Now all that remains to be seen is if the "traditionally built" Mme Rabotswe is in the same league as Nigella and Jamie!

And which other fictional characters would you like to see shares recipes?

The Lance Armstrong of Writing

Tash Aw is interviewed on The Fairly Current Show this week :

Seksan's in June

Sorry. You must have wondered where the write-up of Saturday's Readings@Seksan had got to. Here 'tis with photos nicked from Azwan Ismail's Facebook album.


Michelle Gunaselan is a freelance journalist and her articles have appeared in Off The Edge, Tell, New Man, and KLUE (where she has a monthly column). She is also involved with Project Malaysia - an online journal of issues.

I've been pushing Meesh (as she is better known) to read for a while, and I'm so glad she let herself be bullied into it. Both her pieces were heartfelt and personal. The first piece was about the prejudice she suffered going out with a boy of another race. The second a very beautiful piece meditation on the subject of hands.


Michelle was followed by poet Alina Rastam who last read at Seksans two years ago, when her first collection Diver and Other Poems was launched. Now she was reading from her second book, All the Beloveds, launched in March.

She linked to Michelle's piece on hands beautifully with her poem My Lover's Hands, and her second poem To Poetry was dedicated to a young man called Tim who came along to Readings for the first time, and had told Alina how he was torn between the course his parents wanted him to do and his desire to pursue a writing career. She also read Persephone's Song from the second collection.

Jerome Kugan is a poet and one of my favourite singer/songwriters (listen to him here) and played five songs for us, two before the break and three at the end of the afternoon, mixing older and new material and one delicious cover On The Street Where You Live. I'm happily anticipating Jerome's forthcoming album.

Robert Raymer, over from Kucing to help judge the MPH Short Story Prize, read a couple of very amusing extracts from his latest book is Tropical Affairs: Episodes from an Expat's Life in Malaysia which is due out later this year with MPH.


Chuah Guat Eng has recently relaunched her first novel, Echoes of Silence (first published in 1994) on her own imprint. Loved the way that she gave us a taste of the novel, dipping in to give us a medley of extracts which had upset readers when the book first came out. (They included a rather nice sexy bit.)

We finished early so that those who wanted to go to the tenth anniversary party at Silverfish could pop over there ... and the rest of us ended up at La Bodega!

Many thanks to Seksan for his ongoing kindness, lending us the space. Thanks to all who came and all who read. Thanks to Shahnim for washing glasses. Thanks again to Shahril Nizam for the poster.

Hope to hold the next Readings@Seksan on July 25th when guests will include Shamini Flint who can finally read us a bit of her Inspector Singh novel, poet/editor Dipika Mukherjee, and (at long last!) Yusuf Martin.

Shih-Li Makes it to Shortlist

Well blow me down! Shih-Li Kow has now been shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor Short Story Prize!

Four out of six collections nominated for this year's short stories award are by first-time writers, and bumped off the list are *gulp*some pretty big names including Kazuo Ishiguro and Ali Smith. (All the shortlisted writers are profiled here.)

Hope this opens all the doors for Shih-Li, including much deserved international publication.

My review of Ripples should be in Starmag this Sunday. (Been waitin' quite a while for it to come out ...)

Bribed Boys

The question of how you get boys to read books has come up on this blog before. One solution - try bribery!

A New Zealand school has realised that every man has his price, and sometimes :

... the cost of getting a teenage boy to read is a can of Coke.

According to teacher Kit Norman, the ploy is working.

The Book Seer

Just finished a book and would like more in the same vein? Here's a new toy to play with. Just type a title into The Book Seer (developed by Aptstudio), and voila! a list of reading recommendations comes up for you.

The suggestions I think are based on buying patterns on Amazon.com, and there is a second list of recommendations from LibraryThing which is based on the books that people actually have in their libraries.

(Thanks Chet for the lead ...)

Best Summer Reads

Another great holiday reads list of a hundred titles, including both fiction and non-fiction - this time from The Sunday Times.

Why Awards Matter

Something like the Readers Choice Awards helps to raise public awareness, and this surely encourages writers to get their work published ... But the most crucial element is the encouragement (the nomination) gives writers. It will encourage them to improve – without high quality writing, the rest is just superfluous. Good writing is the lifeblood of the whole publishing industry.

Chong Ton Sin, managing director of book distributors GerakBudaya is among those interviewed in Starmag today about how awards help boost the local publishing industry. He also talks about how he thinks reading could be encouraged in Malaysia.

More about the Readers Choice Awards today here. Robert Raymer and I were just over in Amcorp Mall where of course we made a visit to Popular Bookstores to vote. What surprised me was the assistant asking us how many forms we wanted! (Could hear Robert thinking, "Hundreds and hundreds so all my students can vote for me.")

Other things in today's Starmag :

Elizabeth Tai talks to Karim Raslan about his new book, and enjoys a tour of the apartment where he writes, with all its disturbing art ...

Leon Wing reviews Robert Bolaño's 2666 ...

Congrats Silverfish

Silverfish Books celebrates its 10th birthday today with a party for its friends today at 5 - 7 p.m. My congrats to Raman and thanks for opening a space for local writers and literature.

Literary Cocktails

Eeleen Lee's Facebook note about literary cocktails made me smile so broadly I thought I'd slip it in here. I mean seriously, we should open a bar! :

1. The Master And Margarita
2. The Turn of the Screwdriver
3. Oliver Twister
4. White Russian Fang
5. Love In the Time of Kahlua
6. Atonicment
7. Cider With Rosies
8. A Clockwork Orange de menthe
9. The Last Mimosa
10. Treasure Island Iced Tea
11. Of Mice and Menthe
12. Death In Venice (a title that would make a great cocktail name..)

Can you punsters out there think of any more?

June Readings

Admission free and everyone very welcome. Please pass on the invitation to anyone else you think might be interested. There’s also a free book giveaway.

Many thanks to Shahril Nizam for designing the poster.

Literary London

London is the literary capital of the world? Not any more, according to Boyd Tonkin in today's Independent:

Our carnival of pluralism rolls merrily on, fit adornment for a global city-state. Yet, a mere generation ago, literary life in London meant something utterly alien to today's cosmopolitan sprawl. In the post-imperial capital that staggered on into the Thatcher era, many aspiring writers still hankered for a single focus of authority. Outsiders might travel hopefully in search of an entrée to this inner sanctum. Look at VS Naipaul's mortifying early career. But few doubted that some secret chamber of wisdom and patronage persisted - if only they could find the door. ...

Shilling, Astroturfing, Google Bombing and Other Dubious Practices

How far do you trust those five-star book reviews at Amazon.com and other book sites? Finlo Rohrer in the BBC News Magazine writes about the practice of shill reviewing where individuals are paid to write positive reviews for a publisher.

Other (rather nice!) terms for the practice include :

Amazon bombing: Concerted effort to change Amazon sales rankings by simultaneously buying product

Sock puppetry: The act of creating a fake online identity to praise, defend or create the illusion of support for one's self, allies or company (New York Times)

Astroturfing: Formal political, advertising, or public relations campaigns seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous "grassroots" behaviour (Wikipedia)

Seeding: Process of placing viral marketing such as videos in forums etc

Of course, we book buyers are really not so naive as to believe all the hype. Or are we?

(Picked up this story from Ellen Whyte's Facebook page.)