New Asian Short Stories

From Professor Quayum :

CALL FOR SHORT STORIES

Asian and Asian diasporic writers, new or established, are invited to send short stories in English for a volume of NEW ASIAN SHORT STORIES to be published by Marshall Cavendish (Malaysia). The book will be edited by Prof. Mohammad A. Quayum whose details are given below. We invite short stories not exceeding 6000 words and NOT published or submitted for publication elsewhere to be submitted to the editor electronically at mquayum@gmail.com, by 15 February 2010. The book will be released in September 2010, and all successful contributors will be sent a complimentary copy of the book upon publication.

About the Editor

Mohammad A. Quayum has taught at universities in Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh, and the US, and is currently professor of English at International Islamic University Malaysia. He is the author or editor of nineteen books (published by Penguin, Pearson Education, Peter Lang, Prentice-Hall, Marshall Cavendish etc), and his scholarly articles have appeared in distinguished literary journals in the UK, the USA, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Singapore, Taiwan, India, and Malaysia.

Please circulate this information to any writer in English of Asian origin you know.

Quayum's Double

I had a most enjoyable visit to the International Islamic University a few weeks back, to plot some acts of literary activism with Professor Mohammad A. Quayam.

(Interesting isn't it, that one of the most interesting academics on Malaysian literature in English should be Bangladeshi by birth and Australian by citizenship - he's a true international!)

We ended up having a most enjoyable chat about approaches to criticism (I reckon academics are incredibly polite, will dissect a text minutely, and examine it every which way ... but are very reluctant to talk about whether it actually "works" as a piece of fiction - and this has to be the focus of the newspaper/magazine critic.)

I was most touched when he gave me a copy of his newest publication, Peninsular Muse, which is a collection of interviews with Malaysian and Singaporean poets, novelists and dramatists including Edwin Thumboo, Wong Phui Nam, Catherine Lim, Shirley Lim, Philip Jeyaratnam, Muhammad Haji Salleh, Kee Thuan Chye and Dina Zaman.

Among other things, Quayum asks them about their writing process, and their thoughts on a range of issues including ethnicity, the problems of censorship, the status of women, and how they feel about writing in English. They says some very interesting things and no doubt I will be lobbing a few quotes at you in blog posts to come!

I wolfed most of the book down in a single sitting. (You can find some reviews of it here.)

If you want to buy the book, you can order it from the publisher, but the price is steep (£ 38.00 US$ 95.95!) as it is an academic textbook which will have a very limited print run.

Much more affordable is Quayum's One Sky Many Horizons : Studies in Malaysian Literature in English which is a collection of his academic essays on Malaysian authors and their works. It's definitely accessible for the interested layperson (such as meself!).

Published by Marshall Cavendish I recently found my copy in Silverfish for RM44.90.