The George Town Literary Festival is less than a week away. In addition to the roster of excellent speakers and panels, there are two special book launch events from the protean Fixi publishing house. The book launch of The Gods and Last Breath takes place on Saturday 29 November...
The past couple of months have seen the announcement of a number major prizes for literary fiction – and we now have them all on our shelves. Richard Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Chatto & Windus) is his haunting story...
The Malay Archipelago, the classic account of Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace's travels through Southeast Asia, first appeared in 1869 and has been much loved by generations of readers ever since. Despite numerous modern reprints with appreciative introductions, this edition is the first – long...
So the KL NOIR – a Fixi Novo anthology in 4 volumes finally comes to a fitting finale. Hot off the press comes KL Noir Yellow which, as the publisher promises, is "sick and twisted". In these fifteen short stories and one essay, you get one...
"I remember sitting next to my brother on the dining table, legs dangling while my mother stood in front of us, filling our mouths with food and our heads with tales from ‘those’ days. In ‘those’ days anything could happen: animals that spoke; humans that...
The recent publication of a new edition of Syed Husin Ali's classic Ethnic Relations in Malaysia: Harmony and Conflict (SIRD) offers a timely moment to revisit the works of this most sagacious and humane of Malaysia's public intellectuals. The new book collects together and updates...
The George Town Literary Festival is less than a fortnight away, so we'd better get a move on with our countdown. The curators have really pushed the boundaries with their invitations to speakers. Said El Haji was born in Morocco and moved to The Netherlands...
Photograph by Jo Wallace (https://www.flickr.com/photos/38791739@N02/5597176691/in/52weeksofspnp/) There are some very powerful new books on the photography of the everyday. Sophie Howard and Stephen McLaren's Street Photography Now (Thames & Hudson) brings a very old genre bang up to date in what is now a truly global conversation....
We've been pretty quiet here recently – so apologies are in order, especially for those of you who wait with bated breath for your daily dose of Gerakbudaya Bookshop news. But most of the team has been labouring day and night with the most monumental...
"This book is bad for my business reputation"! Our stock of Lukas Straumann's Money Logging: On the Trail of Asia's Timber Mafia arrived today. In case you hadn't heard, it's a devastating exposé that lifts the lid on timber corruption in Sarawak. Lukas has been...