“Terse and profound, deliciously local and specific, a huge pleasure and a must-read.” —Gina Apostol, author, Insurrecto
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.
Alfian Sa'at is a Singaporean author, playwright, poet, and translator. He has written more than thirty plays in English and Malay that have been read and performed in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, London, Berlin, Hamburg, Zurich, Munich, Copenhagen, and Stockholm. He is the author of the short story collection Corridor and the poetry collections One Fierce Hour, A History of Amnesia, and The Invisible Manuscript. His awards include the National Arts Council Young Artist Award for Literature, the Golden Point Award for poetry, and three Life! Theatre Awards for Best Original Script. Malay Sketches is the first of his work to be available in the US. He is currently the resident playwright of the acclaimed theater group W!LD RICE. He lives in Singapore.