Are you a Mrs Koh?

We all know what  Lolita or a Shylock or a Scrooge is. Each of these character names has become a by-word for certain kind of individual.  But what about a Mrs Koh? Worse still, might you yourself be a Mrs Koh?

Robert Raymer tells me that he was pleasantly surprised to find an article by educator Denis Harry in The New Straits Times telling readers why they should be wary of the Mrs Koh type :

... who is lurking somewhere waiting to pounce on her next promising victim

The character is from Robert's short story Neighbours. (You can download the PDF here.) Writes Harry :

Neighbours, a fine work by Robert Raymer in Lovers and Strangers Revisited, highlights Mrs Koh as the central character. She fabricates stories to create rifts between neighbours. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Maybe this is because there are many Mrs Kohs in this world, people who really are venomous, vicious and potentially damaging, ready to trample on whoever stands in their way.

Raymer is spot on in creating Mrs Koh's character as she is portrayed as someone we both love and loath at the same time. When you hear her loud voice mentioning someone's name in high decibel, you know she wants your attention and she knows she gets yours.

On the other hand, deep inside your heart you keep praying that she does not talk about you. Whether you want to admit it or not, we all have a certain degree of nosiness. Sensational stories surely catch our alert-as-a-rabbit's ears. Unfortunately, they come with a hefty price tag.

Mrs Koh is someone we would call a nosy parker. ... In real life, you can never argue with whatever a Mrs Koh says; she is always right.

In addition to that, she knows everything and wants you to be aware of that too. Here is the sad irony: someone like Mrs Koh may appear warm, friendly and welcoming to those on first encounter with her. Her ability to crack jokes and make fun of other people's flaws and sufferings make her a "people magnet", drawing in audience the moment you anticipate she is going to say her first word. 

Summer Shorts

The Guardian features five short stories from established authors : Hilary Mantel, Barabara Trepido, Roddy Doyle, David Mitchell and Téa Obreht, as well as one from the winner from their short story competition and five runners up in their Summer Fiction Special.

Sellerating Away!

I was very happy to receive my copy of  Clutch, Brake, Sellarator - the compilation of the winning entries for last year's MPH Short Story Competition, for which I was one of the judges. Encountering the stories again reminded me of the morning all those months ago the six of us battled it out over the 20 stories that had been shortlisted for us. And I have to point out that anything I say in this post reflects my own views and not necessarily those of the judging panel as a whole.

There were, you will remember, two grand prize winners.

Tan Twan Eng's  Some Things Will Remain set the bar for the competition very high indeed (as you would expect from a Booker-longlisted author) I loved the control of the piece - not a word is wasted and the story builds and builds to its heart-stopping climax while the peace and beauty of the setting, a lotus-covered lake, contrasts so starkly with the ugliness of the crime. I appreciated too how much is left unsaid, for the reader to bring their own interpretation of events to the story. 

The title story by Ivan Yeo was enjoyed by all the judges for its humour, carefully observed characters (we particularly loved the "not girlfriend"), and strong Malaysian voice. However,  I must confess that I found it a little over-written in places and I personally had a problem with the sudden change of mood at the end which seemed out of keeping with the rest.  But it is a very strong debut piece and I do hope that Ivan keeps writing : control and craft can be learned, but the strong storyteller is there already.

Of the runners-up, the story I thought strongest was Lee Eeleen's The Englishman at Table 19. It is simultaneously a coming-of-age tale, a ghost story, and a comedy exploring the family holiday from hell: it works very well on all these levels.

Pilling Time is a surreal short story by Shih Li Kow which the judges enjoyed very much.  It was very nicely written (and would we expect any less from Shih-Li?)  but I have to say that I preferred her more "rooted-in-the real-world" pieces in Ripples.

The Hunter and the Tigress by Zed Adam Idris is a dark and magical story which captures the smell and feel of the Malaysian rainforest. It's disturbing (I found particularly chilling the scene where the tiger design on the plate begins to move and bites the hand of the man trying to steal it) and it doesn’t give easy answers.  I was interested to see in the notes in the front of the book that this piece had grown from a short short story - because I've told Zed that it feels as if it needs to grow larger still and perhaps become a novella.

Vincent Foo's The Cobra's Mate is set in Sarawak.  I liked that there was plenty of action  and that the writer manages to maintain tension. I was fascinated by the insights into the dayak culture of the time.  


The competition has, I think, been very important in opening up another avenue for local writers, and in encouraging short story writing, and this collection is well worth a read.   I'm looking forward to next year so I can send in an entry myself!

Three Friends on Frank O'Connor Longlist!

Biggest congrats to friends longlisted for the Frank O'Connor short story award : Wena Poon for The Proper Care of Foxes; David T.K. Wong for Chinese Stories in Times of Change and O Thiam Chin for Never Been Better. (All three books are sitting on my dining table been read in rotation! And if you should want copies of your own, they all should be in our local bookshops.) 

The total longlist is 54 strong this year (comprising 26 women/ 28 men; 21 Americans, 12 British, 6 Indians, 3 Canadians, 3 Irish, 2 New Zealanders, 2 Singaporeans, and one each from Bangladesh, Bhutan, Bulgaria, China, US Virgin Islands. 

David TK Wong, incidentally, is appearing at Readings@Seksan this Saturday and reading an extract from the new novel he is working on.

Postscript :

The longlist for the Edge Hill Short story prize has also just been announced.

New Stuff from Asiatic

The new issue of Asiatic published by the IIUM English Department is out and includes articles about local literature, book reviews, new poetry fiction and even a short play by Kee Thuan Chye!

Don't forget, this is a good place to send your own work too!

2009 - The Year of the Short Story

2009 has proved that rumours of the death of the short story – so often forecast that almost every review of almost every collection seems duty-bound to repeat and thus propagate it – are greatly exaggerated. The consensus running through the end-of-year reviews is that it's been a vintage year for short fiction, and I agree.

writes Chris Power on The Guardian blog and goes on to list many of the year's publishing successes.

And while there are still problems facing short story writers :

In the US it's commonplace for short story writers to get a deal for their first collection only on the proviso that a novel follows, a business practice that casts short story-writing as apprentice work. In the UK it's worse still, with story collections treated like dirty secrets to be snuck out in disguise ... with only a determined study of the back cover revealing the truth. And I don't know if it's a case of reading practices following publishing's lead or vice versa, but I'm constantly surprised and disheartened by the number of readers who tell me they don't read short stories, as if they were a homogenous type that could be not to your taste like, say, policiers.

he says he sees more reaon to celebrate than mourn :

Radio 4 broadcasts nearly 150 stories a year; the Atlantic's recent decision to sell short stories via its Kindle store inspires hope for a vibrant market for individually sold shorter works, while flash fiction and sites dedicated to the short story continue to proliferate online.

Well, if 2009 was good, let's hope 2010 ... and the whole of the coming decade ... will be even better for my favourite literary form!

(Cartoon by Tom Gauld.)

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.

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.

Best British Literature ... is Sci-Fi

Alison Flood in today's Guardian reports that award-winning science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson (left) has hit out at the literary establishment, more particularly Booker judges for ignoring science fiction, which he calls

... the best British literature of our time.

Literary fiction he says, usually turns out to be historical novels (and that is certainly true of most of the books on this year's shortlist) :

In his original piece published in New Scientist (and very well worth reading) he says :

... these novels are not about now in the way science fiction is. Thus it seems to me that three or four of the last 10 Booker prizes should have gone to science fiction novels the juries hadn't read. Should I name names? Why not: Air by Geoff Ryman should have won in 2005, Life by Gwyneth Jones in 2004, and Signs of Life by M. John Harrison in 1997. Indeed this year the prize should probably go to a science fiction comedy called Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts.

And he throws down this challenge to the magazine's readers (I reckon its one we could all take up) :

Read science fiction, read historical fiction, make your own judgement, and then talk about it. Try this as a kind of experiment: read 30 writers new to you. It's a big project, but what a lot of good reading would come of it. And New Scientist readers will be quickest of all to see that the literature that best expresses our time, that speaks to our time, is science fiction. How could it be otherwise? Our world is a science fiction. ... This is important, because you need the literature of your time. You can't get the meaning of our life in 2009 from historical fiction, nor from science alone. Novels serve us, and are treasured, because we want meaning, and fiction is where meaning is created. Scientifically minded people could perhaps conceptualise novels as case studies or thought experiments, both finer grained and wider ranging in their approach to meaning than cruder genres such as religion, psychology or common sense. A literary life is an ongoing moral education, a complete geography of the human world.

Incidentally, New Scientist also announced a Sci-Fi flash fiction competition, and nowhere in the rules does it say that it isn't open to international readers - so go for it.

Ox-Tale Soup

The charity Oxfam (which also just happens to be Europe's biggest retailer of second-hand books) have teamed up with Profile Books to produce Ox-Tales, four volumes of short stories with contributions from 38 authors.

... inspired by one of the four elements. These roughly correspond with the four main areas of Oxfam's work: conflict resolution (fire), water projects (water), climate change (air) and agricultural development (earth).

William Skidelsky, reviewing the collection in The Observer sees this as yet another sign of the current health of the short story in Britain.

The Independent is running a competition to see if readers can match opening paragraphs with their authors. I say never mind trying to work out the answers - these are great examples of how short stories that we all could learn from. Don't you feel pulled right in?

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.

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.

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 ...)

Shih-Li for Frank O'Connor

Congratulations to Shih-Li Kow and to Silverfish. Ripples has been longlisted for the Frank O'Connor Short Story prize (as Wena Poons Lions in Winter was last year).

The list is 57 strong (up from 38 last year) with most entries coming from the US and UK, and there are some pretty big names on there, including Chimananda Ngozi Adichie and Kazuo Ishiguro.

As The Short Review says :

... this is a wonderful move on the part of the organisers, giving much-needed publicity to many, many books not published by mainstream publishers but by small presses without teams of publicists ... . What is also wonderful is that "big" names are alongside newer writers, showcasing that the short story is not just the province of those who have yet to "graduate" to novels!

(Thanks Steven of Horizon Books for sending me the news and the links!)

The Short Story is in Good Health

A. O Scott in The New York Times speaks out against the habit of undervaluing the short story in American letters and points out that :

The great American writers of the 19th century, whose novels are now staples of the syllabus, all excelled in the short form. Herman Melville’s “Piazza Tales” are as lively and strange as “Moby-Dick”; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales and sketches are pithier than “The Scarlet Letter”; Henry James’s stories, supernatural and otherwise, show a gift for concision along with the master’s expected psychological acuity. And the first great American fiction writer, Edgar Allan Poe, secured his immortality by packing more sensation into a few pages than most of his contemporaries could manage in a volume.

Furthermore, the art is still alive and well :

The death of the novel is yesterday’s news. The death of print may be tomorrow’s headline. But the great American short story is still being written, and awaits its readers.

James Lasdun also writes about the neglect of the short story :

Of the literary arts the short story has always been the least honoured, trailing into the House of Fame a humble fourth after novels, plays and poetry. Between Chekhov and Cheever there can't have been more than a dozen major reputations founded solely or even largely on this unassuming form. You might have thought that in our own attention-deficient age, a narrative art based on speed and brevity would have become the main attraction, but outside the creative writing workshop, where its small scale makes it convenient for study (a dismal basis for survival), that hasn't been the case. Lack of encouragement may be the cause, or it may be something inherently skittish about whichever muse presides over this delicate art: a reluctance to settle anywhere long enough to generate a heavy-duty literary industry. It may be the relative newness of the form (if you accept Turgenev's claim that "we all come out from under Gogol's Overcoat", you can date its birth precisely to 1842), or it may be that people regard it as somehow highbrow or artsy; an insider sport for practitioners and aficionados only.

But he too sees things changing and highlights some of this Spring's exciting debuts from across the globe which he sees as indicative of a growing confidence in the form.

Stories in the Park

Here's a riddle for you - how is a short story like a park? :

They are both confined things, but no less for being that. A park isn't the sprawling countryside and the short story isn't a long rambling novel, but they give you a pretty high dose of wonderful literature, or being in a natural environment.

Bet you never thought of the short story in those terms, but the analogy works pretty well.

Alison Flood in The Guardian reminds us that London's parks have a literary heritage. And now a group of contemporary authors (Will Self, Ali Smith William Boyd, Nicola Barker, Clare Wigfall, Sheena Mackay and Lebanese writer Hanan Al-Shaykh) have been commissioned to write short stories, each set in a different park. The stories will also be sold on recycled paper in individual booklets from the parks as well as in bookshops.

Rowan Routh (quoted above) devised and edited the series, and explains in The Bookseller :

I love short stories and always felt that it is a misperception that the public don’t. I was walking through Hyde Park, when I suddenly thought, 'So many Londoners love these places, and they have such a literary heritage - so many greats, like Dickens, Thackeray and Conrad, have set scenes in them' . . . So I thought of the Park Stories series and approached The Royal Parks to produce them.

Will it work though? Nicholas Lezard on The Guardian blog is sceptical, citing the unpredictability of authors, and more seriously the fact that :

... specially commissioned literature, particularly in modern times, tends to fall flat.

Still, as a reader and a lover of London, I think that a walking tour of the parks in late spring with a nice story to read on a park bench is a pretty nice way of getting reacquainted with the city.

And like so many other great ideas ... couldn't this one be brought to a city near you?

Shih-Li's Launch

Why not go cheer on Shih-Li Kow at the launch of her collection of short stories, Ripples, at Silverfish this Saturday, 21st Feb at 5.30 p.m.? Full details on the website. And yes (much as I hate to admit Raman is ever right about things!) the book is very good indeed.

Romancing the City

Thought you might like to see some photos from the Urban Odysses launch today.

Actor Mano Maniam* gave a very powerful speech about the importance of storytelling and ofcapturing this comparatively young city which is a cross-roads for almost all cultures and religions on the page. He was incredibly encouraging of the writers ...

Here's the mock-up copy of the book he signed ... . Isn't the art work (by Chor Shy Miin) great?

And those writers who could make it. I can't put names to all the faces, I'm afraid, so please help me fill in the blanks someone!

Paul Gnanaselvam is at the far left, Rachel Chan is the lady in red, Daphne Lee is the one with her head on the picture (but who is behind her?), Yusof Martin is the mat salleh guy with the beard, Tan May Lee is at the far right.

I would have loved a speech from Eric and Janet, the two editors, but those guys are incredibly self-effacing! For sure, the collection wouldn't have happened without their determination to get it off the ground, and their hard work in putting it together.

I was a bit sad because afterwards most of the writers seemed to disappear quickly before I had time to chat with them or buy the book to get it signed by them ... Maybe it was my fault for gossiping too long with Daphne, Twan Eng and Lansell in the Book Cafe! (There were so many friends there I hadn't sen for a while ...)

Anyway, if any of the writers read this, I would love to extend an invitation to participate in a future Readings@Seksan. Give'em a nudge would you??

(*Here's a piece by Zahara Othman about Mano's recent performance in London.)

Postscript :

I should definitely link here this post on Eric's blog featuring some of the writers whose stories were chosen.

Urban Odysseys Launch

We imagine the city to be a glamorous and seductive place, the forefront of excitement and adventure, the pulse or nerve centre of the nation. Bright lights in a big city that never sleeps, the café culture, the theatres, clubs, orchestral concerts, expensive restaurants and shopping in pristine malls: all enticements for the young and wide-eyed, or appeasement for seasoned, ambivalent city-dwellers. ... Yet how often do we choose to overlook the dirt and decay that exist within every urbanised community, or inadvertently neglect to notice that beneath the glossy exterior of consumerism and excessive consumption lie forgotten, invisible people steeped in poverty, and apathy that allows new building developments to flourish beside slum dwellings? ... Urban Odysseys: KL Stories is a rich compendium of stories and creative nonfiction set against the landscape of the Malaysian capital.

Tomorrow is a very big day for my friends Janet Tay and Eric Forbes of MPH, because it sees the delivery of a much awaited baby. Their first anthology of local short fiction, Urban Odysseys, will be launched by actor Mano Maniam at MPH Megastore One Utama at 2 p.m.

There was a desperate need for a platform to encourage new (I've just avoided the "young" word, Yusof!) writers after Raman of Silverfish decided to discontinue the New Writing series and congrats to MPH for picking up the gauntlet and producing a collection that does them - and those writers they feature - credit. There's some sterling stuff by writers I already know and respect ... and some exciting new voices.

Yes, I have read the book already - sort of - because I was one of the proofreaders. (So go on, blame me for the bloopers I didn't spot.) I will be reading a second time - for pleasure.

More about the book later, but meanwhile read Eric's full introduction here.

Shih-Li's Ripples

Raman was kind enough to give me a copy of Shih-Li Kow's collection Ripples and Other Stories when I dropped by the shop this afternoon. I really want to read it, especially after reading Amir Muhammad's praise for it in the Malay Mail.

(Really - blessings be on Amir's head for making such an effort to write about Malaysian books in his Pulp Friction columns, which you can read here. And in this case, I was amazed that this review was published even before I was aware the book was out!! No flies on this guy.)

But we're talking about Shih-Li, about whose contribution to the earlier Silverfish collection News from Home, had me saying that that sampler:

... left me hungry for much much more from this writer ...

Raman stuck a press release in the bag with the book. He says he has decided to nominate her for the Commonwealth Writers Prize in the South East Asia and South Pacific First book category. I hope it can also be entered (following Wena's lead) for the Frank O'Connor.

We have no hesitiation in pronouncing this one collection of short stories Malaysians can be proud of. There is no 'cringe' factor here. Shih-Li kow proves that we don't have to leave the country and live elsewhere to be a good writer. She will inspire many.

says Raman, who also tells us that :

Ripples and other Stories was a pleasure to work with. it is not often that a publisher says this because writers can be notoriously precious about their work (even when it is not very good). waiting for them to fisnihs writing to a dateline is bad enough. and once they have finsihed the first draft, they think that they are done, that their work is perfect. It is normally impossible to get them to rewrite anything. ... But not with Shih-Li Kow. She promised to send her work in by the end of October, and she did, despite her hectic work and home-making schedule. She works as an executive for six days a week while bringing up her ten-year-old son, Jack. While other writers expend their creativity in cooking up excuses for not completing their work, Shi-Li uses her creativity to write. And when she was told that she would have to tweak her work a little more, she had no hesitation. She is a perfectionist who takes pride in her work and would not allow anything she is not absolutely satisfied with to be published.

Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. I'll be letting you know how it tastes.