Malay Sketches: Stories, Alfian Sa’at

Description

Malay Sketches: Stories
Paperback – February 27, 2018
by Alfian Sa’at (Author), Isrizal Mohamed Isa (Foreword)

Longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and selected by Electric Literature as one of the must-read collections of the year, Malay Sketches introduces American readers to Alfian Sa’at—one of Singapore’s most incisive, daring, and essential literary voices. These stories offer a sharp, compassionate, and often unsettling portrait of the Malay-Muslim community in Singapore, a doubly minoritized population navigating the complexities of race, class, gender, religion, and national belonging.

With precision and heart, Alfian captures moments of rupture and revelation: a hijab-wearing schoolgirl who refuses to shake the president’s hand; a woman joining an “East–West” dating site who instead meets a Muslim French-Canadian man in her Arabic class; the terrifying specter of the hantu tetek—a ghost who kills children by crushing their heads between her breasts; a Malay doctor’s shame over his patient’s teen pregnancy; and a lonely stranger who experiences unexpected tenderness toward a sleeping boy on the bus.

These stories shimmer with emotional acuity, weaving together piety and doubt, nostalgia and modernity, fear and tenderness. Grounded yet prismatic, Malay Sketches explores how individuals carry the weight of history and the immediacy of daily life, revealing the quiet rebellions, private longings, and cultural tensions that shape a community often overlooked in Western literature.

For the first time available in the United States, this collection showcases Alfian Sa’at’s remarkable ability to blend political insight with poetic grace. Malay Sketches marks the arrival of a major contemporary storyteller whose work is as universal as it is deeply rooted in place.