Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Six
Gwee Li Sui, editor
Epigram: 2023
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Seven Sacks of Rice and Other Baggage
Nicholas Yong
Marshall Cavendish: 2023
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The historian Benedict Anderson saw the novel as the prototypical modern Southeast Asian literary genre, its unifying storytelling imagining new national communities in Indonesia and the Philippines. Yet the short story has perhaps been more significant in the region. Unlike the novel, it is portable: it can be published in newspapers and magazines and then anthologised or collected in single-author volumes. It is more easily translated than either the novel, with its forbidding length, or poetry, with its complex use of literary language. It also migrates from medium to medium, and can be adapted for radio or television, or distributed via websites and social media. In Southeast Asia, the short story has been an assimilative genre, spread via the print capitalism of Anderson’s modern imagined communities, but incorporating older oral genres such as folk tales, myths and ghost stories. It has also been both a pedagogical genre, promoting modernisation of life worlds and new national languages, and a space of critique of colonialism and later of the developmental state.

Short stories usually condense into books in two ways: either as anthologies on particular themes chosen by an editor, or in collections published by a single author. Given Singapore’s developmental ideology of meritocracy, it’s perhaps inevitable that Epigram Books’s biennial Best New Singaporean Short Stories uses literary merit as a criterion for selection. The sixth volume in the series, ably edited by Gwee Li Sui, is impressive in its imaginative and geographic reach. Many stories move beyond the island, revisioning it as a node in regional flows of capital and culture. Others look more deeply into the divisions or hidden places within Singapore society, bridging gaps and making new connections. The stories immerse readers in an alternative reality, or a present reality seen from a new perspective: when we finish reading and return to the everyday, we now see the city state with a double sight.

• Tags: Gwee Li Sui, Issue 34, Nicholas Yong, Philip Holden, Singapore