Latest news with #fiction
RNZ News
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Bookmarks with author Gina Butson
author interview books 2:30 pm today Gina Butson worked as a lawyer for many years but seems to have always harboured a love for fiction writing. She's had short stories published in a variety of local outlets, she's won the Salient Creative Writing competition, and last year was named Highly Commended in running for the Sargeson Prize. Gina has released her debut novel. It's called 'The Stars Are A Million Glittering Worlds'. She shares her picks for books, films, music and podcasts with Jesse.
South China Morning Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Novelist Jemimah Wei is telling a different story of Singapore
Jemimah Wei remembers being struck recently by a simple encounter on the American book tour for her debut novel, The Original Daughter. A reader, having enjoyed Rachel Heng's The Great Reclamation (2023), told her he was eager to dive into another story set in Singapore. For Wei, it was a sign: fiction from the city state was gaining traction, and people wanted more. 'It's just great news for me to hear that someone read one Singapore story and is now interested in other stories from Singapore,' says Wei via Zoom from New York during a break from promoting her book. 'I dream of a world where there is, like, an immense plurality of stories from Asia. It shouldn't be a case where somebody from a specific background can only write one type of story. 'It's amazing that there are more and more writers who are coming forward and more and more writers who see other writers do it and think, 'I could also do it.'' Debut novel, The Original Daughter, by Jemimah Wei. Photo: Handout For 32-year-old Wei, her own watershed moment came in 2015, during a 10-week creative-writing course in Singapore, when she met Malaysian author Tash Aw (The Harmony Silk Factory, 2005). 'I was like, OK, he's Malaysian and he's a writer. Why can't someone from Singapore be a writer?' she says. 'So I went out and tried to do it.' Published this April by Doubleday Books, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday and a division of Penguin Random House, The Original Daughter explores the complexities of identity, belonging and familial bonds through the lives of two sisters. At its heart are Genevieve Yang and Arin – half-sisters but, in reality, cousins – bound by a shared history yet divided by secrets. Together, they navigate the shifting dynamics of their relationship across time and distance. One of the novel's central ideas emerged from Wei's fascination with the concept of a 'return sibling' – in this case, Arin, a cousin from the secret family of a grandfather who is unceremoniously dumped on the Yang family after the old man's death. 'It was extremely common in the generation right before my own, where you would have people give away family members or take people in,' says Wei. 'People don't talk about that very much. All those silences were things that I really took note of when I was growing up. The premise of this novel about a girl being given away into a family is something that I was always very interested in.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sunday short stories, episode 1 : My Big Fat Greek Honeymoon
This week's story takes us to the beautiful Greek island of Santorini, where love and suspense dance under the setting Mediterranean sun. Hello readers! My name is Kay Kingsman and I am a fiction author and travel writer. I am starting a new weekly column called "Sunday short stories" that will be travel-focused short stories, each week featuring a new story in a new destination - a la Shakespeare when he used to publish his now famous stories in his local newspaper. If this particular story is not your cup of tea, feel free to skip; each week will be a different genre. If you love reading, please consider subscribing so you can be the first to read every week! Now with that intro out of the way, let's get into the story. My Big Fat Greek Honeymoon, by Kay Kingsman location: Santorini, Greece genre: crime, suspense content warnings: murder (off-screen) *This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. ——— I was the one scared to get married. Everyone knew that. Yes, it was a bit stereotypical of me, being a 30-something male and all, but marriage was a big deal. If anything, society was a bit too relaxed and casual about the fact marriage entails completely merging everything about your life to another person. And how long did newlyweds typically know each other? A couple years? Practically strangers. I was certainly not the man I was even two years ago. Plus, my heart had been broken before so I didn't fancy the idea of having to pay thousands of dollars to eventually have the same thing happen all over again. Thankfully, Iris, bless her sweet heart, was very patient with me. When we passed jewelry stores, she pretended to check her phone or suddenly feigned interest in the particular color of the sky. If we ate at an upscale restaurant, French if I chose or Mexican if she did, Iris would politely excuse herself to the restroom while the host looked up our reservation. However when my eyes followed her body sashaying into the bathroom, she would always pitstop by the kitchen to question the staff by miming kneeling and opening a box. Most of the time, they would shake their head, but on the off-chance they confirmed her suspicious of any proposals, we would promptly eat anywhere else. I had never watched a romantic movie with Iris either. She claimed that genre was nauseatingly ridiculous and catered to the chauvinistic ideal that a woman's life, no matter how successful, was not complete without a witty and slightly arrogant male partner. "Are you just saying that because I'm not witty or slightly arrogant?" I would tease. "Well, you are definitely one of those," she would retort with a smirk, turning on Top Gun for the fiftieth time. Not that I was complaining. And while Iris wasn't completely wrong, about the romance genre not my level of wit, I couldn't help but notice her Netflix saved list was cheesier than a plate of nachos. Iris did it all for me, which, when I was finally ready six years later, made my actual proposal extremely difficult. I had to catch her completely off guard. She foiled my restaurant proposal twice, a fireworks proposal once, and she even caught the time at the Ferris wheel. I had asked the conductor to stop us at the top when Iris ran to grab a bag of cotton candy, and even made eye contact with him as we got inside our pod. We stopped at the top, sunset dazzling in the background. I took the box out of my pocket, then called out her name. My heart was in my throat as she looked at me. Then she threw up all over my shoes. I put the box back in my pocket. It had come to the point where I wasn't nervous anymore, just frustrated about carrying around an awkwardly shaped velveteen cube for six months. For those who asked later of our proposal, they were answered with the story of how we stayed in Friday night for our favorite activity (again, Top Gun) and Iris asked me if she should skip her Pilates class in the morning and I responded with 'Will you marry me, Iris?' Not the cutest story, but at least vomit wasn't involved. She even had a work around for my hesitation around price. "A destination wedding?" I looked at her incredulously, but she just beamed back with her dazzlingly white grin. "They're actually so much more affordable than normal weddings. Resorts usually have a package so less planning too. And my yiayia and Papou can join us." My eyebrows furrowed together. "Wait, what do you mean?" Now it was her turn to look at me incredulously. "I'm Greek." "Oh. Really?" "My name is Iris." As if that was supposed to mean anything to me. Most of the Irises I had known were Asian. "Well, that's cool..." because I didn't know what else to say. Iris had never mentioned anything about her heritage before. See - practically strangers. "But you were born here, right?" Her eyebrows rose into her hairline, "Does it matter?" "No not at all." I quickly backtracked. "Greece sounds incredible." And it was. Iris was beautiful in Greece. We arrived to the island of Santorini, Greece a full week before our wedding so she could show me the streets she used to run down barefoot every summer on her annual family trip. There was something about the Mediterranean sun kissing her skin that made Iris even more beautiful. Her bright blue eyes sparkled like the water lapping up at our feet on the rocky shores. Her hair glistened, soaking up the warm rays until the curls expanded into a full thick halo around her head. The language dripping from her tongue blossomed a new personality, one that I had only briefly seen after Iris had a glass (or three) of wine. On our wedding day, she was beautiful. In between resort staff pulling and prodding me in every direction as they ushered us through the schedule, friends and family sobbing throughout the entire day, plates breaking one thing I remembered was how beautiful she was. The day after our wedding day, she was also beautiful. Looking down at Iris now, her eye makeup smeared down her cheeks and one set of fake eyelashes perched on the side of her forehead, she was still beautiful. The day we met, it was at a dim bar on a Wednesday night. I just had a bad day at work and she was out for happy hour with her girlfriends. Her future bridesmaids, in fact. Iris had absolutely no makeup on, but her laugh made everyone turn around to watch her. For one, her laugh was very loud and on the verge of a snort with every inhale, but it was also invigorating. She was beautiful then too. Meanwhile, those same bridesmaids stood behind her at the alter, their eyes as dry as the whiskey shots that night. The way the sheet laid over her naked curves, revealing no information but teased to their secrets, I wanted everything to happen all over again. The meeting, the first day, the first kiss, the second kiss, every kiss after, all the hand holding and laughing and binge eating then stomach aches and the fairs, movies, vacations, running errands together. And the wedding. Oh the wedding. I wanted it all again, and to last forever. Bruises from last night trickled down the side of her neck in a twisted galaxy of blue, purple, and red, but already starting to lose vibrancy. Iris still wore her veil, I couldn't get her to take it off. Not even a full day after the wedding. No one could convince her to part with it, and I knew she wanted to live in the dream again. For it to last forever. The veil was ripped, torn into thin lace curtains cascading down the chestnut curls of her hair, now matted from hairspray and friction. Even with her eyes closed, I knew Iris was the love of my life. 'Is that her?' The coroner asked again, his hand firmly gripping my shaking shoulder. I hadn't even realized I was shaking. I hadn't even realized I was crying, barely holding myself up as my heart landed in my gut. Even with her blue skin and her fingernails ripped off and scratches running up and down her limbs, Iris was beautiful. And it was only the beginning of our honeymoon. ——- Stay tuned for Sunday short stories, episode 2, when we head to the continent of Africa for a rivals-to-lovers story set nestled in the mountains of Morocco! Solve the daily Crossword
CBS News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Book excerpt: "The Satisfaction Café" by Kathy Wang
We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article. In "The Satisfaction Café," a gently witty new novel from Kathy Wang ("Family Trust"), a woman from Taiwan moves to California, where she finds a new life as a wealthy man's fourth wife and mother to his children. But her search for connections leads her to create a safe space for people to find what they really want: to be heard. Read an excerpt below. "The Satisfaction Café" by Kathy Wang Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now. Joan Liang's life in America began in Palo Alto, where she lived in the attic of a two-story home on Azalea Street. Joan did chores for the widow who owned the house in exchange for reduced rent; she never could have afforded such a nice neighborhood otherwise. She lived in that attic until she was married, and she was married for only six weeks before she stabbed her husband. Joan was twenty-five and had lived in the United States for two years. The year was 1977. Joan had not thought she would stab her husband. It had been an accident (sort of). Afterward she was disappointed that marriage had not turned out as she'd imagined. She had thought it would be wonderful. It had been, actually. Until it wasn't. Though later, Joan would wonder why she'd ever thought marriage would be so special. As a child in Taiwan, most of the married women Joan encountered were melancholy, if not outright miserable; throughout her childhood, Joan's own mother had on occasion risen from the kitchen table without warning to cry with showy force into her hands. "You've ruined everything!" Mei would shriek if any of the children came near, and so they soon learned to keep away, which only worsened Mei's despondency. At least every other Saturday, Joan's father, Wen-Bao, spent the night across town in Shilin, where he kept a two-bedroom apartment for his mistress. Joan's mother was haunted by the two bedrooms; it drove her nuts, Mei said, to think of so much empty space. "Can you imagine," Mei would remark, legs crossed as she sat before her vanity, "how much lust a man must carry inside, to furnish such a large place for one woman? When all six of us are crowded in the same square footage? Do you understand the scope of his betrayal?" At this point Joan's brothers usually wandered off; they were bored by this conversation, which repeated itself every few months. Only Joan would remain at her mother's feet, where she watched Mei sit with perfect posture before her mirror and pluck white strands from her hairline. After moving to California, Joan established the routine of calling her parents every Sunday evening Taipei time, during which Wen-Bao, if he'd visited his mistress that weekend, would have already returned home. On these calls, Joan's parents performed the same interrogation: how her studies at Stanford were proceeding, if there was any chance to graduate early from her master's program so that she might begin to earn money. Money was key. Joan had three brothers, each of whom by various rights (older, male) should have been sent abroad before her. Two had been disqualified by their academics, whereas the top candidate, Alfred, had been surprised by "issues" (his girlfriend was pregnant), and so at the last minute Joan was sent instead. From "The Satisfaction Café" by Kathy Wang. Copyright 2025 by Kathy Wang. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Get the book here: "The Satisfaction Café" by Kathy Wang Buy locally from For more info:
Irish Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
New Laureate for fiction Éilís Ní Dhuibhne: ‘I was part of a movement of women writers of Ireland'
It is typical of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's modesty that she was delighted even to be shortlisted for the €50,000-a-year role of Laureate of Irish Fiction. This week's news of her appointment, succeeding Colm Tóibín , Sebastian Barry and Anne Enright , has left her 'overwhelmed'. It feels like 'even more of an honour', she says, than her PEN award for an outstanding contribution to literature, the Hennessy Irish Writing Hall of Fame award or her appointment as Burns Professor at Boston College. More pragmatically, she observes that another difference is that it involves 'a fair amount of responsibilities and duties. It's a very public role. You don't just grab the medal and walk off.' This laureate will not be resting on her laurels. While she is still discussing with the Arts Council the details of her three-year programme, one idea that appeals to her is visiting every county to celebrate its distinctive literary heritage. READ MORE As a bilingual writer, the daughter of an Irish-speaking father from the Donegal Gaeltacht who grew up speaking Irish in Dublin, she will also be promoting literature in Irish, 'which I've already been doing thanks to The Irish Times', a reference to her reviewing work, which she thinks helped raise her profile for the laureateship. 'People believe they can't read a book in Irish, that it's too difficult, but it just takes a bit of effort. Even when I'm reading, I would come across words every couple of pages that I'd need to look up, but it's a lot easier now with the internet. I've been learning Bulgarian for 10 years (she has a Bulgarian daughter-in-law) and have to look up a word on every line. I know that sounds a bit schoolmarmy.' Ní Dhuibhne has already done her bit to popularise reading in Irish by writing a bestselling series of crime novels as Gaeilge, beginning with Dúnmharú sa Daingean (Murder in Dingle). 'People told me they'd never read a book in Irish before and were surprised that they could.' Ní Dhuibhne is a most versatile author, having written more than 30 books, in both Irish and English, for children, adolescents and adults, spanning novels, short stories, plays, memoirs and literary criticism. Although her best-known work is probably The Dancers Dancing, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction (then known as the Orange Prize) in 2000, her preferred form is the short story. Prof Margaret Kelleher of UCD, in her introduction to the Ní Dhuibhne's Selected Stories (Blackstaff Press, 2023), praised 'their incisiveness and wry humour, and her keen eye for the incongruous and the familiar made strange'. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne at home in Dublin. 'My short stories are closer to my true personality.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill 'When I'm writing at my most serious and deepest, it's the short story,' Ní Dhuibhne says. 'When I'm writing for younger people, it's made up completely, although the stories do end up with something of you in them. My short stories are closer to my true personality. 'The short story is a focus on a moment of truth, when the veil of reality is lifted for a moment to reveal a deeper truth. Because it is short, it has a connection to time which is more controllable. Shelley described inspiration as like a spark to a coal, which begins to fade as soon as you start writing. With a novel it fades on day one and you have to keep rekindling it. With a short story it doesn't have time to fade. You can grab the energy of inspiration and get it drafted before it's gone. That's why short stories can achieve a sort of perfection it's almost impossible for a novel to achieve. [ Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is new Laureate for Irish Fiction Opens in new window ] 'The only guideline I like about short stories is that something has to happen to someone on the surface, a dramatic incident of some kind, and something has to happen underneath, an excavation, what the meaning of the story is.' And yet the short story is, for many readers, the poor relation to the novel. 'Readers like to get lost in a story, immersed,' Ni Dhuibhne says. 'They don't like dipping in and out, just getting to know a setting and the characters and then it's on to the next one.' That's why she feels long short stories are the most successful, more like short novels. The Dancers Dancing, a coming-of-age novel set in an Irish college in the Donegal Gaeltacht, that uniquely Irish rite of passage, grew out of a short story, Blood and Water, after Dolores Walsh, a fellow member of her writers' group, told her she could get a novel out of it. 'It's about a group of girls who go from Dublin to Irish college and it explores the relationship of the English- and Irish-speaking worlds, the urban-rural divide. My main character Orla is in a slightly challenging position. She is not a complete outsider as her mother's family is from that area, she has lots of relatives there and is ashamed of them. Old stories have a luminosity and beauty, a wildness of imagination that can be lacking in contemporary life — Éilís Ní Dhuibhne 'Orla doesn't yet accept the wholeness of her personality. This teenager is trying to navigate a way through middle-class Dublin life and this other side of her, poor Irish-speaking people in Donegal. That arose from my experience as a child and teenager. I aspired to be more upper class than we were. Quite a lot of my fiction explores the connection between past and present, our ancestry.' She is not sure she can describe her voice as a writer. 'Maybe I'd aspire to make it intimate, very gripping. I have quite a comic voice, I'm at home with irony.' Ní Dhuibhne has also spent many years teaching creative writing, at UCD, Trinity, Boston College and the Irish Writers Centre. Her pupils included Colin Barrett, Henrietta McKervey, Andrea Carter, Jamie O'Connell and Jessica Traynor. The new laureate has a rich literary social life, with a lot of writer friends. She has been in the same writing group for 40 years now with authors Catherine Dunne, Lia Mills and former minister of state Liz McManus, among others. It started as a national Irish women writers' workshop set up in 1985 by Eavan Boland, to address the underrepresentation of women's voices in Irish literature. Ní Dhuibhne studied folklore at university alongside English and is now president of the Folklore of Ireland society. The old stories are a big influence on her own writing. 'That is one of my characteristics. I often counterpoint contemporary, modern stories with a folk legend or tale. It gives a different dimension, a deepening.' Éilís Ní Dhuibhne at home in Dublin. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill The first time she did it was with Midwife to the Fairies, the story of a secret birth, in which a midwife goes to a fairy hill and assists with the birth of a child. The other inspiration was newspaper reports about the 1984 Kerry babies case. 'Perhaps it was a way the community had of telling reality in a coded way. I am a folklorist, I do it to offer an interpretation of the old story. On the other hand it gives depth and lustre to what might be a thin little story without it. Old stories have a luminosity and beauty, a wildness of imagination that can be lacking in contemporary life. These stories have survived for centuries because they have some attractive quality.' Ní Dhuibhne's Irish-language memoir, Fáínne Geal an Lae (Clo Iar Chonnacht 2023), tracks her childhood until the age of 12 in 1966. 'It ends on a very optimistic note with the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Rising. My sister and I were lucky with the time of our birth, just in time for free secondary education and grants for university. I wrote it during Covid when everyone was writing memoirs. My life was so different to my children's, I wanted to document it.' Her other memoir, Ten Thousand Days, addresses the death of her husband Bo in 2013, and their lives together. Was its purpose to process or record? 'In the first instance, the former, to process my feelings of devastation and grief at the loss of my husband, but also to record the story of our relationship. 'Bo's death was very difficult, traumatic and horrible. It does take some years, but gradually one gets back to being myself. I think of Bo and I miss him in various ways but I feel healed. Writing the book certainly helped me get through the first three or four years but the real healer is time.' [ 'Grief dissolves you. I could no longer sleep upstairs in our bed' Opens in new window ] Her grief was also channelled into two superb short stories, The Coast of Wales and New Zealand Flax, commissioned by Sinead Gleeson and Belinda McKeon respectively for anthologies. 'I couldn't write about anything else. That was the only thing I was thinking about. They are examples of stories I would not have written if I hadn't been invited to.' Ní Dhuibhne has had two great influences in her writing life, Canadian Alice Munro and Irish feminist and LGBTQ+ activist Ailbhe Smyth. Back in the 1980s, soon after she had married and had two children, Ní Dhuibhne joined a women's studies forum that Smyth had set up in UCD. 'She opened my eyes to cultural feminism, the facts of literary history, that there weren't as many women writers as there should be. I had been blind to the facts. I did English at UCD without realising we only read three women (Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte and Jane Austen) in three years. It was consciousness raising. 'I could have let writing go but it became more than a matter of self-expression or personal ambition. It seemed I was now part of a movement of women writers of Ireland. It took off and now we have gender equality in fiction. Women are no longer ignored. There is no way you could have a syllabus these days that excluded women.' Munro, the late Canadian author, 'showed me a way of writing about the past and connecting it to the present' through her stories about her ancestors. 'It definitely influenced Blood and Water. Before that, my stories were really corny, probably because I wasn't linking past and present, just taking my father's anecdotes and trying to transform them into literary stories.' Munro's mesmerising, intimate style pulled her right into the story and her protagonists' unpretentious lives. 'It seemed artless, though obviously was not at all. I loved her luminosity the way she handles time, the way her stories spread out and are not tight little stories focused on one thing. I learned a lot about composition from her.' A wry, dry humour is another of the laureate's trademarks. The Literary Lunch, a satire on self-serving members of an arts organisation dining for Ireland, is her most popular story. The Arts Council must have a sense of humour too. 'Perhaps they haven't read it,' she laughs. 'I know everyone thinks it is based on the Arts Council but it's not at all. It was inspired by another committee.' As well as the late English comic writer David Lodge and Samuel Beckett's bleakly comic novels, she was weaned on an Inter Cert anthology featuring Somerset Maugham and Saki. Finally, why should people read fiction? 'It's hard to answer that without sounding trite,' she says, 'but it is the best way of getting inside the head and heart and personality of other people, total empathy. I think that is its trump card in art. It's so entertaining, you're entering into the lives of other people. In fiction there is an intimacy of contact with humanity, it's psychologically insightful, it teaches you something.' Éilís Ní Dhuibhne will be in conversation with Niall MacMonagle at a free public event in the National Library, Dublin, on Tuesday, September 16th at 7pm.
