Clearance Sale at Skoob

Many thanks to Trailshoppers for letting me know about a clearance sale at Skoob which goes on till 25 February. Every book is priced at RM10 or less! The address is : Skoob Books Lot 122&133 Level 1 Menara Mutiara Majestic 15 Jalan Othman PJ (Old Town) (Map) If you haven't ever found your way to this wonderful Aladdin's cave of books, this would be a very good time!

The Virtues of Virago

My favourite writers at this time were all men - Beckett, Flann O'Brien, BS Johnson, Alasdair Gray - but at a time when I was also struggling to find my own voice as a novelist, Dorothy Richardson flung open a door on to a new world of possibility. And, while my student contemporaries were immersing themselves in the new generation of British writers (the Granta generation, you might call it: Swift, Amis, Barnes and McEwan most prominent among them), I found myself drawn back repeatedly - almost perversely - to those bottle-green spines.

Author Jonathan Coe talks in the Guardian about how the Virago Modern Classics series and the women authors who changed his literary landscape forever.

Virago Press:

the first mass-market publisher for 52% of the population – women. An exciting new imprint for both sexes in a changing world'

was set up by Carmen Calil, Ursula Owen, and Harriet Spicer (left) in 1973. The Modern Classics series was launched in 1978 with:

... a list dedicated to the celebration of women writers and to the rediscovery and reprinting of their works ... (to demonstrate) the existence of a female literary tradition and to broaden the sometimes narrow definition of a classic.

Among the authors brought to prominence by the series are many now widely acknowledged as among the world's best writers, including Margaret Atwood, Willa Cather, Grace Paley,
Pat Barker, and Angela Carter.

But was it necessary to have press solely for books written by women? And even if it was necessary in the dim and distant 70's, haven't we come along way since then?

Coe believes that there remains a gender bias in publishing "subtle and unspoken" even now.

If we take the Booker prize (for want of anything else) as being indicative of what the British literary establishment has considered most attention-worthy over the past 40 years, a clear preference emerges. In the first 30 years of its history, 108 of those shortlisted for the prize (63.5 per cent) were male, only 62 (36.5 per cent) were female. The Orange prize was set up in 1996, partly to correct perceived gender bias in the Booker (after it had gone through a particularly chauvinist phase - in the years 1991-95, only five women were shortlisted, compared to 24 men), but in the past nine years of the Booker, the pattern still hasn't changed noticeably: 33 men (61 per cent) have been shortlisted, compared to 21 women (39 per cent). ... Perhaps one shouldn't read too much into these statistics. And yet do they not imply, cumulatively, that while the reading public (spurred on by book groups and the Richard and Judy show) now has no hesitation in embracing and indeed privileging the work of women writers, the female novelist might still feel that the ultimate imprimatur of literary status - not the Booker prize itself, of course, but that indefinable sense of being taken seriously - still dangles tantalisingly out of reach?

If you are inspired to rush out to pick up the Modern Classics back list, the best place to try in the Klang Valley is Skoob.

Dzof the Viper?

Dzof Azmi's column in the Star at the weekend was a wonderful wind-up for people who love the physicality of published books. Words ... not books are what counts, he says, as he predicts the imminent demise of the paper manifestations and the growth of digital ones. Do go read.

(We've had this debate before, of course, and I can pretty much predict what your take on the issue is, just as you can most probably predict mine!)

Was much amused to read on Azmi's blog that Thor Kah Hoong had called up his mum and called Azmi ' a viper':

... for suggesting that the writing was on the electronic wall for physical books.

His response? :

I like that, I've never been compared to a muscle-engined sports car before.

Anyway, should Dzof's vision of the future come to pass, I would probably become Thor's best customer, and get stuck in a happy time-warp rediscovering past literary glories!

KL's Little Bookshops

Thanks Marisa for pointing the way to this article in the New Straits Times yesterday about KL's independent bookshops. It's nice to see the publicity for these little shops which are till able to hold their own despite competition from the big boys.

Not sure though Raman who caters for "the discerning reader" would care to be lumped together with the book rental places!

Above is a pic of Skoob proprietor Thor Kah Hoong. Time to make a vist if I could only get past these warehouse sales.

Texts Alive!

We won't get more than about 30 people, I told Pang as we arranged a semi-circle of chairs in an intimate semi-circle for our Night of the Living Texts event. Fifty, tops. This was all fixed up so late, we haven't had a whole lot of publicity out, and that mainly on blogs and e-groups.

Besides, I thought, how many people will turn up mid-week for a literary gathering?

An awful lot as it turned out! I didn't take a head count, but probably around 100 people turned up, the numbers swelled even more when the Philosphy class that Hishamuddin Rais was teaching next door ended.

Many of the usual "readings" crowd (our bohemian beatnik chic Saturday afternoon arty-farties) showed up. Others were blogfriends - some materialising into physical form for the first time including Fei and Joshua. Still others were drawn in by the link with the British Council Reading across Cultures: Teaching English Through Literature conference.

Bernice Chauly (who set up the whole "readings" thing) was there, and I felt so happy to see her.

It was a very huggy kissy start to the evening, interspersed by moments of logistical panic.

And so on to the "show":

Roger Robinson was just the best opening act we could have hoped for, and he set a standard (particularly in terms of dramatising his work!). He read a very funny prose piece in which there was a character called Sharon, also known as Virgin Island (so of course, this Sharon now has a new nickname). Would have loved the opportunity to hear more and vow to track down Roger at a reading when I'm back in London.

Roger's Trinadadian accent just melts me, reminding me of old friends I miss so much ...

John McRae introduced our second speaker, and I appreciated his words very much. John was involved in the launch of the Skoob Pacifica series (a very important imprint which really launched local writing), and said that at the time of publication there was little interest in South-East Asian writing in Europe. And now the situation has totally changed and Malaysian writers are being published in the UK. Case in point ...


... Tan Twan Eng, whose immensely readable first novel (I know'cos I couldn't put it down!) The Gift of Rain, set in Penang, is out in hardback on March 8th, and paperback May 20th. This was Twan's first public reading. He choose the opening pages of the novel which hint at great mysteries to be unravelled. This audience should be hooked enough to buy it!

Louise Doughty read from her short story Doikitsa which appeared in New Writing 13, (also, I think she said, part of her Novel Fires in the Dark about the European Roma ) in which an elderly woman lies dying in her wagon.

Our second Malaysian author of the evening, Kam Raslan, read a couple of naughty passages from Confessions of an Old Boy and created a lot of laugher.

We took a break then, and folks wandered down to the Bau-Bau cafe which had opened specially for the night to sell us drinks. Much literary networking happening in the meantime.

Then Dina Zaman was up to read from I Am Muslim. Post-David Frost experience perhaps, this is a much more confident Dina than I've seen read before. Enjoyed the voices in her pieces, especially the piece was the possessed masseuse.

Isagani Cruz read a condensed version of one of his plays - a monologue about a zarzuela (traditional Filippino music theatre) performer. Very nice indeed! And I particularly loved the way his character has a little gossip about a certain writer called Isagani! (And we were talking only the other day about writers who put themselves into their fiction.)

Taiwanese poet Ke Hua Chen ended the evening for us with a poem in Mandarin with English translation. (And we finally got a chance to hear his version of the poem as song lyrics on CD when Pang came back from talking to friends outside to press the right button!)

To all who read, to all who came, to Pang for all his help, to the British Council for lending us their writers, to young Nic for letting himself be bullied into a whole lot of jobs, the biggest possible THANK YOU!!!!

Central Market turned out to be a great location and I am beginning to have lots of ideas about how we can make use of that space for other events of this kind ...

Postscript

Do go and read Jordan's post too. Ruby Ahmad says she had a great time and has some great pics of everyone ... except me. *sob*. BP doesn't want anyone to sell him a book ... and is the third person I've come across with a story to tell of the gents loo. (At least he only found someone smoking in there, Jordan and Nic had much worse ... or better, depending on which way you look at things.) And if you read Chinese, you can tell me what Fei and Joshua have written!

The Dina Zaman File

Dina Zaman suggested the idea of a blog interview the other day to tie in with her reading this afternoon at Borders. Since we'd arranged to meet yesterday morning to talk over a couple of her stories, it seemed like the right opportunity.

After all, if as Raman suggests, the local newspapers aren't featuring much book news, doesn't a self-styled litblogger have a duty to scoop an exclusive?

I've enjoyed Dina's writing for some time. The first stories I came across were published in a little volume called Night & Day (Rhino Press) and I felt rush of joy as I read them. Not only did the writing slip down easily, she was the first writer I'd come across who'd manged to get down to the page a Malaysia I recognised. (Heck, She even captured characters I had seen myself on the street!)

Dina told me that she had spent hours observing people while waiting for her bus after work (she was a PR executive for Central Market or wandering Petaling Street. The stories were there and waiting for her.

Dina says that she's always felt a sense of rootlessness, of being in the outside of things. Her father was a diplomat and the family had to continually move between postings so that she always felt like the new kid in town.

Born in 1969, she spent her early years in Tokyo and grew up speaking Japanese with "just a smattering of English, so that no-one knew what to do with me". One of her strongest memories from these early years was her mum making her a pair of wings because she fancied being a butterfly. The family later moved to the former Soviet Union where she attended an Indonesian school and has vivid memories of being bullied.

Because of the disruptions to her education, Dina moved back to live with her grandparents in rural Terrenganu and fell in love with kampong life. She was also homeschooled for a while - an experiment she describes as not being too successful, before the prestigious Sekolah Tungku Kurshiah and then Convent Bukit Nanas.

She discovered that writing was her vocation whilst on a degree course in Mass Communication at Western Michigan University. Forced to find a subsidiary subject, she chose creative writing initially because it seemed an easy option, but she found she had a flair for it, and Philippa, one of the pieces she wrote while there, found its way into Skoob Pacifica Anthology Volume 2 (1994) published by Thor Kah Hoong of Skoob Books.

A spell in PR followed, but Dina began to submit pieces to the New Straits Times, and before long she was offered her own column by editors Rose Ismail and Fatimah Abu Bakar. Christened Dina's Dalca (named after a kind of lentil curry which contains a whole mixture of ingredients), she soon had a large number of followers intrigued by the frankness of the writing, delighted by the humour. She also had pieces accepted by Men's Review where she describes editors Kam Raslan and Sheryl Stoddard as supportive "but tough".

She runs through the names which were most prominent in the writing scene in the early '90's, a time when the writing scene seemed so much more exciting, ("There were so few of us in the KL writing scene in those days, so we all knew each other and were working towards a common goal") but laments that of all those promising young voices only Bernice Chauly and Jit Murad are still writing.

Dina's blog The Gongkapas Times (written she says "to let off steam") carried on from where Dalca left off, and was one of the most popular destinations in the Malaysian blogosphere. There was a collective howl of sorrow when the blog suddenly got taken down by a hacker and months of entries were completely lost. (The good news though, is that it's back.)

She did an MA in Creative Writing in Lancaster, choosing it over SOAS because of London prices and a desire to be in the countryside and "live out farm girl fantasies". And there was the Lake District close at hand of course, with its writerly associations with Beatrice Potter and William Wordsworth.

She says that she didn't really feel stretched by the course where she felt she was repeating stuff she had done for her first degree. But homesicknesses was assuaged by writing about kampong life, and she finished the draft of a collection of short stories set in rural Malaysia. One of the stories, And She Became an Angel, was shortlisted for the Ian St. James Awards. (The collection The Road to Elvis and Other Stories will be published later this year.)

Her year in Britain also gave Dina the opportunity to travel around Britain and talk to fellow Muslims, and the idea for a new column about Islam was formed.

After a spell working for Marie Claire, she became editor of Rentakini, the magazine section of the controversial online newspaper, Malaysiakini. Her I Am Muslim column was born and Dina became a powerful female voice for moderate Islam in the country.

If Dina has become something of a public figure, she is at heart is a very private person who feels uneasy when her personal space is invaded. Her writing has attracted legions of fans, including some who don't respect her boundaries. "When you're very open and write about your life, people feel they know you."

She's also had her fair share of detractors over the years, she says, including those who ask "What is this Malay girl trying to prove?" and her early fiction has been criticised for being "too sexual, too angry". There's less anger, a great deal more humour in the new collection, but the stories are still bound to stir some controversy.

And once The Road to Elvis is Published? Dina's colourful stories about the larger than life characters in her extended family can keep me enthralled for hours, and I'd love to see her write a dynastic novel about her Terengganu roots ala Allende or Marquez.

Curiosity stirred? Well then, come over and hear her read some of her writing this afternoon at Borders! The fun begins at 3 p.m.

Skoob is Books Drawkcab

Wonder how many of you actually know that we have a branch of the best secondhand bookshop in London?

(And yes, I have checked out the parent store, Skoob in Russell Square - how could I not?)

Skoob Malaysia has gone through a variety of incarnations. When I first came across it in the early 90's it was sharing half a shop-lot with a dobi shop. (That's a laundry - notice how I am now carefully translating terminology! Let's let shop-lot slip past and hope Walker doesn't notice!)

It later moved to slightly larger premises just up the road in Jalan Telawi 3. The first time I wandered in there, I had a surreal experience. Now bear in mind that this was well before the days of the big bookshops, when the best that could be found in Bangsar was a rack of Jackie Collins and Jeffrey Archer in Guardian pharmacy between the headache pills and the face creams. For some reason, I had a craving for a copy of Boswell's Life of Johnson.

I asked the woman behind the counter, expecting her to say something along the lines of "Huh?".

Cindy (for 'twas she) didn't skip a beat. Without looking at the shelves, without consulting any data base or list, she calmly asked "Would that be the 1923 Everyman edition in two volumns or the Heath&Co 1929 edition?" I nearly died of shock on the spot! We checked the shelves and both were there. An oasis in the dessert.

An oasis too of intelligent conversation as proprietor Thor (no relation to the thunder-god, unfortunately) playwright, actor, theatre-director, critic, lecturer, and his musician wife, Cindy, are book-loving kindred spirits.

I loved the shop for it's sheer plenty. Shelves were filled to capacity. There was a terrific range of novels, poetry, literary biographies, and of course the philosophy, religion and the occult in which the bookshop specialises. Books were stacked on the floor, filled even more boxes in the backroom, recent deliveries from the mother-ship in London.

Loved too the way that it drew eccentric characters to it. One rainy afternoon, I was browsing in the shelves of my favourite second-hand bookshop when an elderly, dhoti-clad gentleman burst in from the street, angrily brandishing a copy of Middlemarch at Thor who had apparently recommended the novel as the kind of improving read this gentleman said he was after. (He'd rejected a James Clavell novel the week before because the "language was not rich enough"!)

“Why does she call herself George?" he wailed "I don’t read books by women writers.”

I also laughed at Thor's story about customers coming in to buy antiquarian books by the yard to show the world how well read they were.

When rentals in Bangsar started to go through the roof, Thor moved a couple of miles closer to the city centre to a spacious property in Brickfields, behind the YMCA and next to a rather good Indian shop selling thosai. (Love Danny Lim's moody picture of Alvin Wong outside SKOOB in its Brickfields incarnation.).

More recently, it's moved again to Old Town, P.J. (Lot 122 & 123 Menara Mutiara Majestic, Jalan Othman to be precise), and takes a little more tracking down.

It's a book-lovers haven still (and a lot of books are much cheaper these days) and thanks to Cindy's artistic touch (flowers, lights, teak benches, cushions), the ambience is as squidgy as you could desire. Thor will even make you a cup of tea to sip while you browse. (Tell him Sharon said so.)

As I write this it strikes me that I badly need to make a pilgrimage to Skoob to fill some gaps in my collection, especially now that I have bookshelf space. (But for how long at this rate?? *sigh*).

Photo from The Sun