時代精神書屋

Corridor is a collection of short stories all set in present-day Singapore. With unsentimental clarity and heartbreaking honesty, Alfian Sa’at writes about HDB dwellers – students, housewives and factory workers, whose lives begin to unravel once they discover that happiness is a fragile thing in a country obsessed with progress and success.

The characters in each story find themselves in situations that offer them a ticket to hope and change: A video camera transforms the way a resentful daughter sees her widowed mother. A married couple receives free holiday tickets just when their luck seems to have run out. A girl encounters a transvestite on an MRT train ride who tells her that she looks like a famous singer. And a man enters a discotheque after a bitter divorce and re-learns the terror of falling in love all over again.

Rich in authentic detail, with a sensitive ear for the vernacular, Corridor paints an elegiac, revealing portrait of contemporary Singaporeans who exist along the city’s corridors – haunted by lost loves, irrevocable childhoods and a deep longing to be free.

Corridor won the Singapore Literature Prize Commendation Award in 1998.

What if you could dream up any building you like? What would it be? How would constructing it change our lives?

A shopping mall self-destructs, and a single mother vanishes. A tree house for orphans and old folks is torn apart by an act of mercy. The Singapore Flyer is reinvented as a political prison. In this collection of nine tales, Clara Chow examines an alternative Singaporean landscape—one that exists only on paper—and the people we might be in it. A former newspaper correspondent, she interviews nine architects about chimeric structures and sets short stories in them. A hybrid of journalism and fiction, Dream Storeys documents the voices of urban visionaries, while taking their ideas into inventive, evocative new territories.

Architects featured
Yen Yen Wu • Chang Jiat-Hwee • Nirmal Kishnani • Lai Chee Kien • Michael Leong • Mark Wee • Olivia Tang • Joshua Comaroff • Tan Kok Hiang

Endangered tigers connecting telepathically through time-travel; a guard’s ethical dilemma at a history museum; a slaughterhouse worker’s memories of his dead wife; a monochrome town upended by a wild watermelon…

In This Desert, There Were Seeds is an intimate collection of past and future dreams, featuring exciting new and established literary voices from Western Australia and Singapore. From our shifting sense of community and identity, to our frustrations with existing political, social and economic structures—this anthology transcends boundaries and captures the persistence of ordinary lives in deserts literal and metaphorical.

Longlisted for the 2013 Frank O'connor International Short Story Award

Malay Sketches is a collection of stories that borrows its name from a book of anecdotes by colonial governor Frank Swettenham, describing Malay life on the Peninsula. In Alfian Sa’at’s hands, these sketches are reimagined as flash fictions that record the lives of members of the Malay community in Singapore. With precise and incisive prose, Malay Sketches offers the reader profound insights into the realities of life as an ethnic minority.

Nine Yard Sarees is a multigenerational portrait of a fictional Tamil Brahmin family. Comprising eleven interlinked stories, this short story cycle traces the lives of nine women from 1950 all the way to 2019, shedding light on the community and its evolution through the decades. As the stories take us from India to Singapore, Australia and even America, we follow the experiences of the women in the family: Raji the matriarch who lives in seclusion at an ashram; her daughter Padma who struggles to raise her family the traditional way; Padma’s daughter Keerthana who is about to be married and don the nine yard saree, a symbol of womanhood. Tender, dynamic and full of heart, this cycle is a resonant portrayal of female solidarity and the complexities of the diasporic experience in contemporary Singapore.

“There is so much to appreciate in Prasanthi Ram’s debut collection, Nine Yard Sarees. As a portrait of a family, these stories connect to form a layered narrative about women, migration and identity. As a work of diaspora fiction about the Tamil-Brahmin community in Singapore, these connecting stories comment on questions of belonging and the pertinent tension between tradition and modernity. Ram writes with precision and clarity about this family while also treating the characters with the warmth and compassion that they deserve. Shifting narrative perspectives and covering a wide landscape of time and geographic space, Nine Yard Sarees confronts diaspora in all its complexity. A thoroughly enjoyable and meaningful work of fiction about family, community and the reverberations of migration and displacement.”
—Balli Kaur Jaswal, Author of Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows

“The madisar, the eponymous nine-yard saree, weaves these stories together beautifully and artfully, these stories about Tamil Brahmin women living mostly in Singapore, but also living, in Prasanthi Ram’s deft, sensitive and humorous telling, in full, human complexity in their loves and hates, joys and sorrows, envies and regrets. Nine Yard Sarees is an uncommonly rich and precise debut, closely observed, magically empathetic and formally ambitious. If you love the stories of Jhumpa Lahiri and Alice Munro, you will love these stories.”
—Jee Leong Koh, Winner of the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize in English fiction

"A gripping, masterfully crafted work that is both haunting and comforting. I read it in one night."
—Akshita Nanda, co-winner of the 2020 Singapore Literature Prize in English Fiction

The following stories contain some references to sensitive topics which may warrant content notices:

Rakshasa—casteist rhetoric; fat phobic language
Agni’s Trials—sexual harrassment
The Perfect Shot—sexual assault
Nine Yard Sarees—racism; fat phobic language
Loose Threads—self-harm; pregnancy loss
In Her Graveyard, She Bloomed—homophobic language; pregnancy loss
Before the Rooster Calls—domestic abuse

While the content of these stories is fictional, these topics reflect real issues. We recognise that the ways in which readers might respond to and deal with these issues may vary, as our relationships to these topics are unique. If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed or not in the right headspace to experience the stories, do put the book down and talk to someone about how you feel.

From a future of electronic doas and AI psychotherapists, sense-activated communion with forests and a portal to realms undersea, to a reimagined origin and afterlife—editor and translator Nazry Bahrawi brings together an exciting selection of never-before translated and new Malay spec-fic stories by established and emerging writers from Singapore. 

Especially in an anglophone-dominated genre, very little of Malay speculative fiction from Singapore is known to readers here and beyond. Yet contemporary Bahasa literature here is steeped in spec-fic writing that can account as a literary movement (aliran)—and unmistakably draws from the minority Malay experience in a city obsessed with progress.