No Funeral for Nazia, interview with Taha Kehar

 No Funeral for Nazia is Pakistani journalist and writer Taha Kehar’s third and latest work of fiction. The story highlights some of the complexity in his hometown Karachi.

He speaks to Devika Misra.

TK: There are two different Pakistans, You have the Pakistan of the elite and then you have the Pakistan that is fairly steeped in middle class values.”

The Plot Twists In Singapore

Southeast Asia’s largest literary extravaganza, The Singapore Writers Festival, will be held next month. Now in its 26th edition, this year’s theme is “Plot Twist”. 

Devika Misra spoke to Festival Director Pooja Nansi about what audiences can expect at the upcoming event.

Pulitzer finalist Vauhini Vara launches her short story collection This is Salvaged.

Courtesy of W.W. Norton and Author

Synopsis

This is Salvaged (W.W. Norton & Company, 2023).

 

A young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbor who is descending into dementia. A pair of teenagers seek intimacy as phone-sex operators. A competitive sibling tries to rise above the drunken mess of her own life to become a loving aunt. One sister consumes the ashes of another. And , in the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project yet: constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible’s specifications. In a world defined by estrangement, where is communion to be found? The characters in This is Salvaged, unmoored in turbulence, are searching fervently for meaning, through one another. 

 

Author bio.

 

Vauhini Vara has been a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine, and is the prize-winning author of The Immortal King Rao. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. 

Courtesy of Author

Award-winning writer Saras Manickam dishes about authorial ego, complicated women and race discrimination in Malaysia in My Mother Pattu

 

Courtesy of Author

About the Book

My Mother Pattu (Penguin SEA, 2023).

 

Deeply humane, in turn wry and humorous, the stories in this collection haunt readers with their searing honesty. Authentic and unsentimental, each story celebrates the resilience of the human spirit even as it challenges comfortable conventions about identity, love, family, community, and race relations.

Saras Manickam, courtesy of Sharon Bakar

About the Author

Saras Manickam won the regional prize for Asia in the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Contest. In 2021, her story was included in the Bloomsbury anthology, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories. 

 

Having worked as a teacher, teacher-trainer, copywriter, and writer, Saras Manickam’s various work experiences enabled insights into characters, and life experiences, shaping the authenticity which mark her stories. 

 

My Mother Pattu is her debut collection of stories. She lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

_________________

 

EC: Congratulations on your brilliant short story collection, My Mother Pattu. I’m delighted to see the love it’s been getting. I’ve not enjoyed a short story collection this much in a while. I’m curious: many of the stories are set in Mambang (which also means haunting/spirit). Is your Mambang a fictional town or based on a real town (e.g. Mambang di Awan, Perak)? 

 

SM:  Thank you, Elaine, for your very kind words. It’s rather affirming that My Mother Pattu resonates with readers.

 

Mambang is not a real town. It’s fictional, and therefore gives me the freedom to craft the streets, houses, places in it. It frees you up, you know what I mean?

 

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng

Devika Misra reports on a conversation between Rachel Heng, and some of her readers. 

Rachel Heng was born and raised in Singapore. She writes both fiction and non-fiction, and her debut novel, Suicide Club (Henry Holt / Sceptre, 2018), was much praised. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, USA. The Great Reclamation, her acclaimed new novel, explores Singapore’s rapid transformation from third to first world in just two generations. At its heart the story is one of unrequited love - a doomed childhood romance and a lost way of life, as both the novel’s protagonist Ah Boon, and his nation, come of age.

Once Our Lives, by Qin Sun Stubis

Qin Sun Stubis speaks to Devika Misra about the power of literature and story- telling.

Born in a Shanghai shantytown and brought up during the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution, Qin Sun Stubis is a Chinese American writer based in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. She has worked as an international communications specialist providing translations and  contributions to Gallup, the Wall Street Journal, and the Getty Center. She is currently a columnist for the Los Angeles based Santa Monica Star.  She also writes poems, short stories, essays and Chinese folk narratives.

Her debut historical memoir, Once Our Lives, explores the deep trauma that tumultuous events in Chinese history inflicted on four generations of the Sun family. From the Second Sino Japanese War in 1937 to an era well past the brutally repressive Cultural Revolution in 1966, the writer’s parents found themselves impoverished and in a constant struggle for survival. Qin was their second daughter; one of four girls. 

The Peking Express by James M. Zimmerman

In 1923, the Blue Express, a luxury train also known as the Peking Express, departed from Shanghai, chugging northward to Peking. On the night of May 5^th, near the town of Lincheng, a gang of Chinese bandits derailed the Peking Express and took the passengers hostage, leading to a standoff that captured the world’s attention.