Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil By Madeline Murphy Turner.

CARISSA RODRIGUEZ: The Maid By Andreas Petrossiants.

ARLENE GOTTFRIED: A Lifetime of Wandering By Anna Dunn.

NATHLIE PROVOSTY: My Pupil is an Anvil By Will Fenstermaker.

CYPRIEN GAILLARD: Nightlife By Sarah Goffstein.

Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables By Jason Rosenfeld.

CARRIE MOYER: Pagan’s Rapture and Seismic Shuffle By Osman Can Yerebakan.

It Just Gets Out of Hand: JOHN COHEN with Stephen Ellis.

SYLVAIN BELLENGER with David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro.

LUCAS ZWIRNER with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve.

Yes, I admit I could be biased too.A message from Phong Bui Publisher and Artistic Director Art The author is a well-known playwright, poet, and social-political writer whom I considered to be anti-establishment (to my dislike) but the meeting at the bookclub softened my impression of him, yet not enough for me to ask for a selfie like I usually did with the other authors I meet.

There are also stories that teach us about the Malay culture, superstitious folklore and unfamiliar Hantu (ghost) stories. I like how he balances the book by giving the Malays’ perspectives (sometimes skewed) of other races in stories like The Convert, A Howling and His Birthday Present, and their own biases and prejudices against themselves. I like how the author tries to not turn the perceived negative stereotypes into the complete opposite but instead try to humanize the portrays of the Malays in situations which may otherwise be another statistic (like drug addicts or teenage pregnancy). These vignettes are chronologically arranged and set in the various places of Singapore with Malay names, starting with Paya Lebar, 5am, and ending with Kaki Bukit, 3am. The book is a collection of flash fiction (no more than 1500 words), partitioned by a one-page vignette in between a few stories.

He was at my book club last Thursday and provided insights into many of the stories, many of which were based on his experiences, as well as what had been told to him by other Malays. The author wrote the book in part to dispel the colonial stereotyping of Malays in the book of the same title by Frank Swettenham, published in 1895.

Malay Sketches by Alfian Sa'at