A rojak* of items that caught my
eye this week…
Sonny Liew: update
As discussed in the previous
post, I recently met Edmund Wee, at the Asian Festival of Children’s Content. Edmund’s
company, Epigram is graphic-novelist Sonny Liew’s Singapore publisher. As reported last week, the government here recently
withdrew a grant of SGD 8,000 for Sonny’s latest offering, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, over objections to the content. Edmund told me that as a result of the
controversy, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock
Chye has become Epigram’s fastest selling book ever, and that the first
print-run sold out in a week. He is now reprinting.
Quick Notice: Nine Cuts, short stories by Audrey Chin
Singaporean author Audrey Chin’s
latest anthology includes stories about: the beating heart of a cannibal picking up a ghoul at a local market in
the City-State; a Vietnamese–American grieving in Alaska; a sister’s love for
her brother, and his dragon fish; a wealthy teenager coming to grips with her Catholic
grandfather’s legacy...and much more. Using a cookery analogy, Audrey says the collection offers: “Poignant
slices of heart - tender, done and spoiled.”
Nine Cuts is to be published in paperback, by Singaporean
publishing house, Math Paper Press, which focusses on poetry, new wave
novellas, full-length novels, and essays. Final proofs are about to be sent to the
printers, but here is a sneak peak of the cover.
Taslima Nasreen
Following the spate of murders of
bloggers in Bangladesh, the outspoken secularist Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen has moved to the US from India, where she'd been living in exile. She felt she was not safe in India, since she’d been getting death threats from the same Muslim extremists who killed the bloggers. Lend your support by following her
on Twitter, here.
Blog Spot
Do you run a blog you think may
be of interest to readers of Asian Books Blog?
If so, get in touch, preferably via e-mail - asianbooksblog@gmail.com -
because I want to include a weekly blog spot in The Sunday Post. The idea is to invite administrators of relevant
and interesting-sounding blogs to write a paragraph about their blog, to be
posted in the blog spot.
Seen Elsewhere
Malaysian pulp fiction has been
attracting a lot of attention. Click here for a report from The New York Times, and here, for
coverage from Publishing Perspectives.
*A rojak is a Singaporean salad.
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