Lion City Lit by Ken Hickson: People of the Book

Words matter. Whether it’s a climate change meeting, an international energy exhibition or the Singapore Writers’ Festival (SWF). The Lions City always has lots of people visiting and living here who are doing just that. Spreading the word.


Let me introduce you to few “People of the Book”. Or books more correctly. And thanks to famous Australian author of historical novels, Geraldine Brooks, for the loan of the title of one of her wonderful books:

Tunku Halim Talks Horror with Elaine Chiew

Tunku Halim, dubbed as the Malaysian Stephen King, surely needs no introduction.

Scream to the Shadows is a retrospective of 20 years of his short tales of horror, also billed as 'world gothic'.

But a short bio for those of you not as familiar:

Bio:

Tunku Halim was born in Malaysia in 1964. He is dubbed the Stephen King of Malaysia. By delving into Malay myth, legends and folklore, his writing is regarded as ‘World Gothic’. 

His novel, Dark Demon Rising, was nominated for the 1999 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award whilst his second novel, Vermillion Eye, is used as a study text in The National University of Singapore’s Language and Literature course. His short story has also won first prize inn a 1998 Fellowship of Australian Writers competition. In Malaysia, he has had three consecutive wins in the Star Readers’ Choice Awards between 2015 and 2017. 

His other books include the short-story collections The Rape of Martha Teoh & Other Chilling Stories (1997), BloodHaze: 15 Chilling Tales (1999) and The Woman Who Grew Horns and Other Works (2001); and the novella Juriah’s Song (2008). His non-fiction books include A Children’s History of Malaysia (2003) and a biography of his late father Tunku Abdullah – A Passion for Life (1998).  

All She Was Worth - A Noir Mystery set in Japan's Bubble Economy

All She Was Worth is a 1992 noir mystery written by Miyuki Miyabe, one of Japan's most famous genre writers, including crime fiction. Taking place in the early 1990s, the novel captures the zeitgeist of the Bubble Economy of the 80s/early 90s, which would soon pop and led to the infamous "Lost Decade."

In search of three Asian Divas, guest post by David Chaffetz

David Chaffetz, author of A Journey through Afghanistan, is an independent researcher of Asian arts and literature. He has read Persian and Turkish at Harvard, and Arabic at Columbia, and has lived and travelled extensively in Asia. His new book, Three Asian Divas, has just been published.

The diva is a nearly universal phenomenon.  Chinese opera, especially in the Ming period, had famous singers who were also courtesans, similar to the early Venetian and Roman entertainers. Similar institutions existed in India, the tawaifs, and in Iran. Traditional Asian divas are however less well known and understood among English-language readers than the divas of Mozart and Puccini. Whether from Shiraz at the court of the Injuids, from Delhi during the twilight of the Moghuls, or from Yangzhou under the last Ming emperors, Asian divas were identifiably modern women. Though practicing classical and tradition-bound arts, they were economically independent, and were free to give or withhold love. Indeed, in many ways, they paved the way for the emergence of the modern woman in Asian societies.

Three Asian Divas brings to life an Iranian, an Indian and a Chinese diva, and in so doing highlights the diva’s social role and the significance of her contributions to art.

David here explains how he came to write Three Asian Divas.

Festival Prologue: Marlon James on Language, Whose Story Is It, and Who Gets to Tell It?

The honour of giving the Festival Prologue at SWF 2019 this year went to Marlon James and as literary prestige goes, Marlon James gets top billing, as winner of the 2015 Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings, a sprawling novel with 76 characters, most of which are written in first person point of view. His fourth novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Penguin Random House UK, 2019), comes equipped with self-drawn maps, and a similar long cast of characters, which was somewhat hyped in pre-publicity as the African Game of Thrones. What have come to characterise his novels are: cacophonous voices, the interweave of fantasy, African history, myths and folklore, a bold collapsing of genres (a flat-out thumbing of the nose at literary snobbery even), a healthy disregard for traditional plot-structures and an intrepid blend of Jamaican patois, language and syntax that is not standard English. Subversion ought to be Marlon James' middle name. 

That his prologue speech at SWF would be trenchant and witty comes as no surprise: starting off with the point 'whose stories get told', he said, "Colonialism. Nothing good came out of it," and the English language, well, that rose out of bad German. While not belabouring the point about how English as a language has been harnessed as, one could argue, a primary tool of British colonialism and even a weapon of combat (to use literary theorist Rey Chow's term), its dominance and how it is to be used in literary narrativising is surely an enclave-like protection of power, and this is what James sets out to knock down in his novels. On his second question: who gets to tell the stories, he spoke about trying to write his second novel, The Book of Night Women, in Standard English and it came across as stilted and false. Searching for language has involved acknowledging and then ridding himself of the shame that had been inculcated in the colonised mind about patois, dialects and local slang.  An apt resonance with the theme of the festival indeed. In the Q&A, I would have liked to have heard more about this process — the trials and errors, the mental back and forth —  in rediscovering, reclaiming and redeploying patois and dialects in fashioning his own literary voice, but I suppose there was so much ground to cover.  

Tsundoku #9

OK – I’m going to put it out there – Christmas is coming. That means two things – 1) getting through all the books you got last Christmas and 2) choosing books as presents (don’t worry – December will be a special gift giving tsundoku). But November offers some good fare. As ever let’s start with some new fiction...

Indie Spotlight: Dollarbird - Monsoon ventures into hybrid publishing

Apologies for the late posting of the October Indie Spotlight. This month we're taking a look at an exciting new development from leading independent publisher of books on Asia- Monsoon Books who have recently launched a new imprint, venturing into a new business model - hybrid publishing. Over to publisher, Phil Tatham for the detail...

Monsoon Books launched its second imprint, Dollarbird, in late 2019 with half a dozen exciting new titles in the pipeline or already in stores. The first title to be released, The Scent of Frangipani by first-time Singaporean author Anjana Rai Chaudhuri, will be officially launched at Singapore Writers Festival 2019 at an event moderated by award-winning author Suchen Christine Lim.

Although Dollarbird continues Monsoon Books’ specialism in concentrating on books set in Southeast Asia, what differentiates it is the business model. Dollarbird is a hybrid imprint, a business model fast gaining ground amongst independent trade publishers in the UK and US. The hybrid model pays authors royalties of 50% of the publisher’s net receipts in return for an upfront payment to help subsidize the publisher’s production costs.

The benefit for Monsoon Books is that the financial risk of producing the book is mitigated, meaning we can afford to widen the net and publish quality manuscripts by new authors or in new genres that we would otherwise have rejected for financial reasons. Like most other indie trade publishers, Monsoon Books is constrained by financial resources and, with some exceptions, tries to publish what it hopes will become profitable for publisher and author. Monsoon typically publishes 12 to 15 new books a year and, increasingly, we are only accepting works in existing series or standalone books by existing authors. It is hoped that Dollarbird will enable us publish more books by new authors and in new genres.