About this item
Highlights
- --SELECTED BY ELECTRIC LITERATURE AS 1 OF 7 SHORT-STORY COLLECTIONS TO READ THIS YEAR--Longlisted for the 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story AwardAn urgent collection of short stories from one of Singapore's most celebrated voices, now published in America for the first time.A hijab-wearing schoolgirl who refuses to shake the president's hand.
- Author(s): Alfian Sa'at
- 214 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
About the Book
An urgent collection of short stories from one of Singapore's most celebrated voices, now published in America for the first time.Book Synopsis
--SELECTED BY ELECTRIC LITERATURE AS 1 OF 7 SHORT-STORY COLLECTIONS TO READ THIS YEAR--
Longlisted for the 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award
An urgent collection of short stories from one of Singapore's most celebrated voices, now published in America for the first time.
A hijab-wearing schoolgirl who refuses to shake the president's hand. A woman who joins a dating website for "East-West" connections and instead meets a Muslim French-Canadian man in her Arabic language class. The hantu tetek--a ghost who kills children by squeezing their heads between her breasts. A Malay doctor embarrassed by his Malay patient's teen pregnancy. A sleeping boy on the bus who awakens a sudden feeling of tenderness in a lonely stranger.
Precise yet universal, grounded yet probing, Malay Sketches gives us a prismatic window into the doubly minoritized Malay-Muslim community in Singapore. Alternating between flash fiction and longer ruminative stories, Alfian Sa'at adopts the role of compassionate and creative demographer, tracing the inner lives of his fictional characters as they navigate individual and collective nostalgias, religious piety and doubt, and issues of class and race.
First published in Singapore, Malay Sketches introduces Alfian Sa'at as a major contemporary author of searing insight, new perspective, and poetic grace to American readers for the first time.
Review Quotes
"Terse and profound, deliciously local and specific and thus absolutely relevant to us all now, Malay Sketches opens us up to a world we need to know. A huge pleasure and a must read." --Gina Apostol, author, Insurrecto
"This is Singapore from absolutely the opposite side of the tracks of Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians." --Electric Literature
"I admired its pitch-perfect language and the warm but acute understanding of characters who do not represent ideas, but live individual lives. Alfian is less the promise of a new generation of post-colonial writers than he is the leading edge of transition to an exciting and contemporary national literature of Singapore." --Harold Augenbraum, former executive director, the National Book Foundation
"A nuanced and moving portrait of Singapore's Malay community. With a beguilingly light touch, Alfian tackles weighty matters of race, class, gender, and language. These quicksilver sketches, often quietly humorous and always compassionate, are a deep pleasure to read and ponder. By turns rueful, dejected, fierce, disgraced, uplifted, baffled, and more, Alfian's characters are memorably real. This is a charming, incisive, and graceful book." --Martha Cooley, author, The Archivist
"Deft and sure-footed, these short, sharp pieces function both as necessary jibes in the face of mainstream complacency, and as a tender, clear-eyed evocation of the Singaporean Malay experience." --Jeremy Tiang, author, State of Emergency
"There is no doubt that [Malay Sketches] is a book that tasks itself with nothing less than the painting of rich inner lives with incalculable hues and tones." --Gulf Coast, YZ Chin, author, Though I Get Home
"Perceptive and provocative, Malay Sketches is a critical exploration of identity's place in contemporary Singapore." --TF Rhoden, Asian Review of Books
"Luminously observant. . . . recognizably of a particular place even to a reader who has never been there. . . . Alfian presents what underpins lives anywhere in the world: the most private or fleeting of thoughts, the limitless nuances of interpersonal relationships, the problems and power of faith, and possibility of wisdom in unexpected places." --Caroline Chang, Full Stop
"Cognitively exacting books--with such fragile themes--come once in a lifetime . . . . Malay Sketches is an unambiguous trailblazer." --Gwee Li Sui, literary critic and poet
"Alfian's vignettes of Singapore Malay life are touching and funny, at once full of pathos and nostalgia. . . . Ultimately, they speak of dignity, quiet and undiminished." --Datin Paduka Marina Mahathir, author, In Liberal Doses
"Like an artist who could capture an evocative scene with just a few bold strokes of the pen or pencil, Alfian only needs a handful of words and phrases to make his characters and their dilemmas leap out of the pages to . . . illumine delicate issues." --Ismail Kassim, former senior correspondent, The Straits Times
"These lingering vignettes, told in Alfian's characteristically poetic cadence, . . . is the narrative of displaced native peoples the world over." --Vincent Wijeysingha, lecturer, SIM University
"A provocatively powerful and brutally honest work." --Laremy Lee, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore