http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1402952705

Singapore noir

"Singapore, with its great wealth and great poverty existing amid ethnic, linguistic, and cultural tensions, offers fertile ground for bleak fiction, as shown by the 14 tales in this solid Akashic noir anthology ... Tan has assembled a strong lineup of Singapore natives and knowledgeable visitors for this volume exploring the dark side of a fascinating country."---- Singapore Noir-- -- -- Write Lies Launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller -- Singapore For much of the West, the narrative of Singapore--a modern Southeast Asian city-state perched on an island on the tip of the Malay Peninsula--has been marked largely by its government's strict laws and unwavering enforcement of them ... As much as I understand these outside viewpoints, I have always lamented that the quirky and dark complexities of my native country's culture rarely seem to make it past its borders ... Beneath its sparkling veneer is a country teeming with shadows ... And its stories remain. The rich stories that attracted literary lions W. Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling to hold court at the Raffles Hotel (where the Singapore Sling was created) are still sprinkled throughout its neighborhoods. And in the following pages, you'll get the chance to discover some of them ... You'll find stories from some of the best contemporary writers in Singapore--three of them winners of the Singapore Literature Prize, essentially the country's Pulitzer: Simon Tay, writing as Donald Tee Quee Ho, tells the story of a hard-boiled detective who inadvertently wends his way into the underbelly of organized crime, Colin Cheong shows us a surprising side to the country's ubiquitous cheerful 'taxi uncle, ' while Suchen Christine Lim spins a wistful tale of a Chinese temple medium whose past resurges to haunt her ... As for mine, I chose a setting close to my heart--the kelongs This is a Singapore rarely explored in Western literature--until now. No Disneyland here; but there is a death penalty."

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