Singapore Noir Paperback by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

Product Details

• Publisher: Akashic Books, Ltd. (2014-06-10)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 242 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781617752353
• Item Weight: 368.55 grams
• Dimensions: 0.0 x 0.0 x 0.0 cm

Singapore is exposed in all of its noir glory with scintillating stories from the very best of the city's authors.

—Singapore Noir was nominated for a Popular Bookstore Reader’s Choice Award.

“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.” —Publishers Weekly

“Singapore Noir is the latest in Akashic’s long-running and globetrotting Noir series, giving plenty of new and unfamiliar voices a chance to shine.” —San Francisco Book Review

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.

Brand-new stories by: Colin Goh, Simon Tay/Donald Tee Quee Ho, Philip Jeyaretnam, Colin Cheong, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Monica Bhide, S.J. Rozan, Lawrence Osborne, Suchen Christine Lim, Ovidia Yu, Damon Chua, Johann S. Lee, Dave Chua, and Nury Vittachi.

From the introduction by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan:

“Say Singapore to anyone and you’ll likely hear one of a few words: Caning. Fines. Chewing gum.

"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, or old fisheries on stilts, that once dotted the waters of Singapore but are gradually disappearing. I have a deep sense of romance about these kelongs, along with the many other settings, characters, nuances, and quirks that you’ll see in these stories. They’re intense, inky, nebulous. There is evil, sadness, a foreboding. And liars, cheaters, the valiant abound.

"This is a Singapore rarely explored in Western literature—until now. No Disneyland here; but there is a death penalty.”

About the Author

CHERYL LU-LIEN TAN is a Singaporean novelist, journalist, and the inaugural George R.R. Martin Chair in Storytelling at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She is the author of the novel Sarong Party Girls and the memoir A Tiger in the Kitchen. Both books were international bestsellers. She is the coeditor of Anonymous Sex and editor of Singapore Noir. In 2024 she was named the chair of the Peyton Evans Artists Residency Alumni Network at the Studios of Key West. The National Arts Council of Singapore has awarded her multiple grants. Prior to writing novels, Tan was a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, In Style, and the Baltimore Sun. She has been an artist in residence at Yaddo and Hawthornden Castle, among other places.