Sex in the city Review by Amir Muhammad Urban Odysseys: KL Stories Edited by Janet Tay & Eric Forbes(MPH Group Publishing, 2009) THIS HANDSOMELY PRODUCED VOLUME is a good excuse to talk about Malaysian Literature in English (MLE). Like the dragon of Lake Chini, the MLE is a semi-mythical creatur...

KUNAL BASU, it seems, was literally born to the writing life. His father was a publisher who met his mother, Shabi, when he published her first book. (She is still producing two books a year at the age of 86.) Basu himself was actually born on the floor of the library at the house in Bengal, surroun...

Whale of a laugh Review by S.W. LOW PEEING IN THE BUSH Adeline Loh MPH Group Publishing, 232pp WEARY of weaving wonders out of words, journo Adeline Loh did what members of the cubicle community usually only dream of doing: resigning and rejuvenating oneself far, far away. The country of choice? Ama...

SIEW SIANG TAY ’s début novel, Handpicked, will be published by HarperCollins Australia in April 2009. The novel is about an Iban village girl who escapes from her longhouse in Sarawak to become a mail-order bride to a fruit-picker living in Renmark, a rural town in South Australia. Tay, who was ...

Sharing a feast of words By JOAN LAU WHAT WAS THE LAST BOOK YOU READ? I know the question sounds like one of those National Reading Week ad campaigns, but, seriously, what was the last book you read? Mine was Roald Dahl’s Matilda. My eight-year-old nephew lent it to me. And yes, it is a childrenâ€...

saws, gags, aperçus & other ephemera “GOOD BOOKS are your friends, not your masters. Take one out for a drink every now and again.� Dave Morris “THEY WERE SO LONELY and silent, these flat acres stretching to the rim of the sky, single men and small family groups working alone on their own...

Redemptive Realignment TAN MAY LEE talks to Suflan Shamsuddin about his thought-provoking book, Reset: Rethinking the Malaysian Political Paradigm , which sets out to achieve the goal of making Malaysia an effective and prosperous nation through rethinking the Malaysian political paradigm SUFLAN SHA...

A classic of its genre Review by MARTIN SPICE NOTES FROM AN EXHIBITION By Patrick Gale (HarperPerennial, 374pp) BIPOLARITY, or manic depression as it used to be called, must be hell to live with. Predictability is surely one of the most treasured things about those who are near to us and whom we lov...

JANET TAY waxes lyrical on food, not books, this time round. She embarks on a quest for the perfect bowl of Sarawak laksa in Kuala Lumpur WHEN I MOVED to Kuala Lumpur some eight years ago, it didn’t take me long to adjust to the bustling city life. I’ve always loved cities and despite the traffi...

The Indifference Engine IN 1999, journalists at The Mirror put Bernice Rubens’s The Elected Member, a former Booker Prize-winning novel, back into manuscript form and sent it to 17 publishers, all of whom rejected it. Little, Brown, who’d printed the novel eight times, said, “It would be a har...