A rojak* of items that caught my
eye this week…
Lion City Lit
Asian Books Blog is based in
Singapore, the Lion City. Here’s a
sampler of what’s going on, locally:
Singapore Literature Prize: The Singapore
Literature Prize 2016, to be awarded in July, has seen a big jump in the number
of submissions. See here for coverage in The Straits Times.
Swag, Singapore’s newest literary
journal, has gone live online. See here
for the inaugural edition.
Jaipur
Literary Festival
The Jaipur Literary Festival 2016
closed on Tuesday. See the festival's Facebook page for an overview of what went on.
Quick notice
Points of Origin, an anthology of
short stories by Diao Dou,
translated from Chinese by Brendan O'Kane.
About the book: Diao Dou’s short
stories encompass everything from closely observed social realism to surrealist
parody, and back again. Covering all aspects of modern Chinese life – from the
high-minded morals of an emerging middle class, to the vividly remembered
hardships of an all-too-recent collectivist past – these stories offer a window
into the contemporary Chinese psyche, and show a culture struggling to keep
pace with the extraordinary transformations that have occurred within it in the
space of a single lifetime.
Stories include those in which:
A letter-writing campaign goes awry when a law is passed
that only allows people to walk the streets at night, if they maintain a
squatting position at all times...
A town is overrun with cockroaches; despite the government’s
official expressions of concern, the only person doing anything about it is
branded an agitator...
A widower is forced to move into the city to live with his son, bringing his cat and his strange country ways with him...
A widower is forced to move into the city to live with his son, bringing his cat and his strange country ways with him...
About the author: Diao Dou is wildly regarded as one of
China’s leading satirists, praised for his refusal to follow any of the
numerous literary trends that often dominate the Chinese literary scene.
About the translator: Brendan O’Kane spent a decade in
Beijing, working mostly as a freelance translator and the co-host of the
Mandarin-learning podcast Popup Chinese.
Details: published by Comma Press, in paperback and eBook,
priced in local currencies.
Review: See the review by Peter Gordon for Asian Review of
Books here.
Book of the Lunar Year
Asian Books Blog is running a
poll to find readers’ choice for the Book of the Lunar Year. For details of the
shortlist, and of how to vote, see here. I’ve been giving weekly updates of
how the voting is going. For the second week running The Boy with a Bamboo
Heart, by Chantal Jauvin with Dr Amporn Wathanavongs, is in the lead, although
Tales of Two Cities, an anthology of short stories from Singapore and Hong Kong is
making a late strong showing. Voting closes a week today:
February 7, Chinese New Year’s Eve for the upcoming Year of the Monkey, when
the winner will also be announced.
Twitter spot
Each week I make a suggestion of
an interesting Twitter account you may like to follow. This week, @llewelyn_morgan, from Llewelyn Morgan, author of The
Buddhas of Bamiyan, the story of the two colossal statues which stood in what
is now Afghanistan for over 1,500 years, until the Taliban destroyed them.
