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Find out more about us at kitaab.org and www.kitaabinternational.com.

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War, loss, love, compassion, nightmares, dreams, hopes and catastrophes; this is literary Asia at its best. From a wide range of geographies spanning from Palestine to Japan, from Kazakhstan to the Malaysia, mobilizing a wide array of innovative narrative styles and writing techniques, the short stories of this anthology, carefully curated by one of Asia’s prominent and daring writers, will take you on a power trip of deep exploration of local (yet global) pains and hopes, a celebration (and contemplation) of humanity and its impact, as explored by 24 writers and 6 translators, many of whom identify with many homes, giving Asia what it truly represents across (and beyond) its vast territory, expansive history, and many traditions and languages. This book is an open celebration of multi-faceted creativity and plurality. The Best Asian Short Stories 2019 includes JOEL DONATO JACOB (Philippines) LANA ABDEL RAHMAN (Lebanon) RAZIA SULTANA KHAN (Bangladesh) DEENA DAJANI (Palestine) ALAN IRID FENDI (Syria) SAMIDHA KALIA (India) SCOTT PLATT-SALCEDO (Philippines) ANITHA DEVI PILLAI (Singapore) ANGELO WONG (Hong Kong) ODAI AL ZOUBI (Syria) SIMON ROWE (New Zealand / Japan) SEEMA PUNWANI (Singapore) VRINDA BALIGA (India) NAMRATA PODDAR (India / USA) T.A. MORTON (Irealand / Hong Kong) HAMID ISMAILOV (Uzbekistan) SUCHI GOVINDARAJAN (India) YD CHANG (China / Malaysia) JOLIN KWOK (Malaysia) IMRAN KHAN (Bangladesh) YAN TI (Taiwan) ZIRA NAURZBAYEVA (Kazakhstan) KAISA AQUINO (Philippines) JOSE VARGHESE (India)

About the Editors

Hisham Bustani, TBASS 2019’s editor is an award-winning Jordanian author of five collections of short fiction and poetry. He is acclaimed for his bold style and unique narrative voice, and often experiments with the boundaries of short fiction and prose poetry. Much of his work revolves around issues related to social and political change, particularly the dystopian experience of post-colonial modernity in the Arab world. His work has been described as “bringing a new wave of surrealism to [Arabic] literary culture, which missed the surrealist revolution of the last century,” and it has been said that he “belongs to an angry new Arab generation. Indeed, he is at the forefront of this generation – combining an unbounded modernist literary sensibility with a vision for total change…. His anger extends to encompass everything, including literary conventions.” Hisham’s fiction and poetry have been translated into many languages, with English-language translations appearing in prestigious journals across the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, including The Kenyon Review, The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2013, the U.K.-based cultural webzine The Culture Trip listed him as one of Jordan’s top six contemporary writers. His book The Perception of Meaning (Syracuse University Press, 2015) won the University of Arkansas Arabic Translation Award. Hisham is the Arabic Fiction Editor of the Amherst College-based literary review The Common, and the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s prestigious Bellagio Residency for Artists and Writers for 2017.

Zafar Anjum is a Singapore-based journalist, writer and entrepreneur. For eight years, he was the online editor of Computerworld Singapore, Computerworld Malaysia, CIO Asia and MIS Asia. He is the author of six fiction and non-fiction titles, including the best-selling The Resurgence of Satyam (Random House India, 2012), Iqbal: The Life of a Poet, Philosopher and Politician (Random House India, 2014) and Startup Capitals: Discovering the Global Hotspots of Innovation (Random House India, 2014). He is the director of Kitaab.org.


The Best Asian Short Stories 2019  (English, Paperback, Series Editor Zafar Anjum, Editor Hisham Bustani)

This is the second volume in the series, edited by Dr. Debotri Dhar, which contains well-crafted stories with innovative characters, gripping plots, diverse voices from 24 writers in 13 countries.

While Rakhshanda Jalil is a seasoned writer known to many in South Asia, Aditi Mehrotra is an aspiring Indian writer whose story delightfully juxtaposed textual passages and news clippings on women’s empowerment with everyday life vignettes of domesticity from small-town India. Martin Bradley’s story highlighted the intersecting themes of travel, historical memory, and communication across differences. Today, when latitudes shift, cultures collide, and we are all travellers in one form or another, in ways perhaps unprecedented, these stories must be told.

Contributors: 
Rakhshanda Jalil (India) Story title: ‘Diamonds are Forever’
Aditi Mehrotra (India) Story title: ‘Don’t Ask! Poocho mat!’ 
Martin Bradley (Malaysia; originally UK) Story title: ‘Bougainvillea’ 
Avery Udagawa (Thailand; originally US) Story title: ‘Festival Time.’ Translation of Japanese writer Mogami Ippei. 
Vanessa Ng (Singapore) Story title: ‘The Grey Thread’ 
William Tham (Malaysia) Story title: ‘At the Moonlit River’s Edge’ 
Rebecca Otawa (Japan; originally from Australia) Story title ‘The Rescuer’ 
Ananya Mahapatra (India) Story title: ‘The Bureaucrat’s Wife’ 
Zarin Virji (India) Story title: ‘Lola’s Honeymoon’ 
Anjana Balakrishnan (India) Story title: ‘For Chikki’s Sake’ 
Reba Khatun (British Bangladeshi) Story title: ‘The Attack’ 
Geralyn Pinto (India) Story title: ‘Cakes’ 
Greg Tan (Singapore) Story title ‘Mango and Sticky Rice’ 
Vrinda Baliga (India) Story title: ‘The Cosmic Dance’ 
Malini Gupta (India) Story title: ‘The Cycle’ 
Vineetha Mokkil (India) Story title ‘The Amulet’  
Migs Bravo Dutt (Singapore; originally Philippines) Story title: ‘Begin Again’ 
Anjaly Thomas Story title: ‘Lucas’s Story’ 
Somrita Urni Ganguly (India) Story title: ‘Boba’ Translation of Bengali Writer Banaphool blessed.
Hezreen Abdul Rashid (Malaysia) Story title: ‘Letting Go’ 

About the Editors

Debotri Dhar was educated in India, the United Kingdom and the United States. She holds a Master’s degree in Women’s Studies, with distinction, from the University of Oxford, UK, and a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University, USA, and is currently a visiting fellow and lecturer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. Debotri juggles university teaching and academic research in the day with lively bursts of creative writing at night. Her short stories have appeared in literary magazines across the world, followed by the short story collection Postcards from Oxford: Stories of Women and Travel. The Courtesans of Karim Street is her second novel.

Zafar Anjum is a Singapore-based journalist, writer and entrepreneur. For eight years, he was the online editor of Computerworld Singapore, Computerworld Malaysia, CIO Asia and MIS Asia. He is the author of six fiction and non-fiction titles, including the best-selling The Resurgence of Satyam (Random House India, 2012), Iqbal: The Life of a Poet, Philosopher and Politician (Random House India, 2014) and Startup Capitals: Discovering the Global Hotspots of Innovation (Random House India, 2014). He is the director of Kitaab.org.


The Best Asian Short Stories 2018

The Best Asian Short Stories 2017 (Edited by Monideepa Sahu & Zafar Anjum)

32 writers. 11 countries. One anthology of its kind in Asia.

The stories in this anthology by Asia’s best known and well-respected contemporary writers and promising new voices, offer fresh insights into the experience of being Asian. They transcend borders and social and political divisions within which they arise. While drawing us into the lives of people and the places where they come from, they raise uneasy questions and probe ambiguities.

Explore Asia through these tales of the profound, the absurd, the chilling, and of moments of epiphany or catharsis. Women probe their own identities through gaps between social blinkers and shackles. A young Syrian mother flees from war-ravaged Aleppo into a more fearsome hell. The cataclysmic Partition of India and its aftershocks; life and death in a no-man’s land between two countries; ethnic groups forced into exile; are all part of the wider Asian experience.

Life flows on in the pauses between cataclysms, bringing hope. Fragile dreams spread rainbow wings through the struggle to succeed socially, earn a living, produce an heir, and try to grasp at fleeting joys and love. These symphonies of style and emotions sweep across Asia – from Jordan and Syria to Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan and Korea. Crafted with love, they continue to resonate after the last page.

As editor Moniddepa Sahu says, these stories come ‘from the heart of Asia, not from the Western perspective trying to make sense of the quaint and the exotic. The home-grown Asian identity runs as a strong undercurrent, with no need to explain and offer apologetic footnotes.’

The following are the contributing authors to the anthology:

1. POILE SENGUPTA, INDIA 2. FARAH GHUZNAVI, BANGLADESH 3. USHA K R, INDIA 4. ROCHELLE POTKAR, INDIA 5. SHOMA CHATTERJI, INDIA 6. JYOTHI VINOD, INDIA 7. YU MEI BALASINGAMCHOW, SINGAPORE 8. LOH GUAN LIANG, SINGAPORE 9. HISHAM BUSTANI, JORDAN 10. CLARA CHOW, SINGAPORE 11. SHASHI DESHPANDE, INDIA 12. SHIRANI RAJAPAKSE, SRI LANKA 13. SONIAH KAMAL, PAKISTAN/USA 14 PARK CHAN-SOON, KOREA 15. SUZANNE KAMATA ,JAPAN 16. JEREMY TIANG, SINGAPORE 17. SUBRATA SENGUPTA, INDIA 18. SHIKHANDIN, INDIA 19. FRANCIS PAOLO QUINA, THE PHILIPPINES 20. MOINUL AHSAN SABER, BANGLADESH 21. GEETANJALI SHREE, INDIA 22. AMIR DARWISH, SYRIA 23. SRINJAY CHAKRAVARTI, INDIA 24. WAN PHING LIM, MALAYSIA 25. N THIERRY, SINGAPORE 26. FAROUK GULSARA, MALAYSIA 27. SARITHA RAO RAYACHOTI, INDIA 28. GEETA KOTHARI, INDIA/USA 29. O THIAM CHIN, SINGAPORE 30. ILAKSHEE BHUYAN NATH, INDIA 31. MITHRAN SOMASUNDRUM, THAILAND 32. SIDDHARTHA GIGOO, INDIA 33. MURLI MELWANI, INDIA/USA

Language: English
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Kitaab International
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9789811149702, 9811149704
Edition: First, 2017
Pages: 456
About the Editors

Monideepa Sahu, editor, worked as a bank manager before veering off into writing. She has authored Going Home in the Rain and other short stories (Kitaab, Singapore), Riddle of the Seventh Stone (Zubaan, India) and Rabindranath Tagore: The Renaissance Man (Puffin, India). She lives a nomadic life, resurfacing in Indian cities like Bangalore and Bhuneshwar. Zafar Anjum, Series Editor, is a journalist and writer based in Singapore. He has authored Kafka in Ayodhya and Other Short Stories (Kitaab), Startup Capitals: Discovering the Global Hotspots of Innovation (Random House India), Iqbal: The Life of a Poet, Philosopher and Politician (Vintage Books/RHI), The Resurgence of Satyam (Random House India), and The Singapore Decalogue: Episodes in the Life of a Foreign Talent (Red Wheelbarrow Books).

Zafar Anjum is a Singapore-based journalist, writer and entrepreneur. For eight years, he was the online editor of Computerworld Singapore, Computerworld Malaysia, CIO Asia and MIS Asia. He is the author of six fiction and non-fiction titles, including the best-selling The Resurgence of Satyam (Random House India, 2012), Iqbal: The Life of a Poet, Philosopher and Politician (Random House India, 2014) and Startup Capitals: Discovering the Global Hotspots of Innovation (Random House India, 2014). He is the director of Kitaab.org.

The Best Asian Short Stories 2017 

Brevity is the soul of wit, as William Shakespeare wrote in one of his longer plays, Hamlet. Flash Fiction, brief stories, have become one of the most exciting sub-genres of contemporary fiction. In This Will Only Take a Minute: Canadian Flash Fiction, Guernica Editions features short short stories by Canadian writers from six words to 500 words in length, short stories from across the entire spectrum of Canadian writing. and anything from stark realism to speculative fiction.

This Will Only Take A Minute: 100 Canadian Flashes (Edited by Bruce Meyer & Michael Mirolla)

ISBN: 978-981-14-8042-3
Title: The Best Asian Short Stories 2020

From the mountains of Uttrakhand in India to the Rocky Mountain in Canada, the stories in this volume represent the multitude of Asian voices that capture the wishes, aspirations, dreams and conflicts of people inhabiting a vast region of our planet. While some contributions deal with the themes of migration, pandemics and climate change, others give us a peek into the inner workings of the human heart through the prism of these well-wrought stories. This volume is the expression of a community, "a community of Asian writing that stands on its own two – no, its own million – feet!", as novelist and critic Tabish Khair says in his 'Foreword'. 



The Best Asian Short Stories 2020

Stories from the inaugural edition of The Best Asian Travel Writing offer you glimpses into the curious, strange and wonderful experiences  in Asia through the eyes and words of our writers. They travelled to find the roots in Cherrapunji, discover the wonders of Bamiyan, volunteer in the high Himalaya, looking for Malgudi among others that offer a frisson of excitement and expectation. 

Currently the Professor & Chairperson, School of Media & Communication MAHE, Dubai, Dr. Percy Fernandez has straddled the world of academics, print, TV, online media and has produced documentaries and TV shows for media organizations like Channel 4, the BBC, Fox TV. He was the expedition photographer for the 2013 NCC Everest Expedition. 

The Best Asian Travel Writing 2020

Fittingly for a crime collection, this debut anthology offers thirteen stories, stretching from India to Japan, with key stops along the way in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. Some of the authors whose work is being showcased in this anthology are Priya Sood, Carol Pang, Timothy Yam, Lee Ee Leen, Wendy Jones Nakanishi, Ricardo Albay, and Aaron Ang, among others.

Richard Lord has written or co-written over 20 books. He was the editor of two popular crime fiction anthologies: Crime Scene Singapore and Crime Scene Asia. He wrote the acclaimed novel The Strangler’s Waltz, and one of his crime short stories was adapted as a TV mini-series by Singapore’s Mediacorp.

The Best Asian Crime Stories 2020

The Best Asian Crime Fiction 2020

The Best Asian Short Stories 2021, the latest in the annual TBASS series of anthologies, presents the Asian short story as a constantly evolving, innovative and vibrant mode of literary expression. Edited by Malachi Edwin Vethamani, Professor Emeritus, Nottingham University, this collection brings together the works of twenty Asian writers and writers residing in Asia, namely from Canada, India, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, Philippines, United Kingdom and United States of America. The broad theme for this collection is the new normal, revolving around the Covid-19 pandemic, with the inclusion of other stories set in the Asian region. The stories on the new normal theme explore how this world-wide pandemic has impinged on private lives and the public world.

The authors whose stories have been selected for TBASS 2021 include Cyril Wong, Sudeep Sen, Elaine Chew, Danton Remoto, Ivy Ngeow, Bella Negi, Terence Toh, Roy Tristan B. Agustin, Bhaswati Gosh, Kiran Bhat, Christina Yin, Gankhu Sumnyan, Parvathi Nayar, Smita P Mukherjee, Susheela Menon, Andrew Innes, Vicky Chong, Donna Abraham Tijo, Namrata Singh, and Jose Varghese.

TBASS2021

The Best Asian Short Stories 2021

This first-of-its-kind anthology showcases an array of the top poets (130 contributors) of this vast Asian region. The book contains the stylistically diverse Chinese poets Lian Yang, Liu Hongbin, Wang Ping and others who share a perspective on their homeland; the oriental touch of the Korean Chung Hee Moon and the Japanese Yosuke Tanaka; Maram al-Masri’s Franco- Syrian metaphors; Sholeh Wolpe’s Iranian-Americanisms, Rosa Jamali’s postcolonial lens on the Middle East; Nese Yasin’s bipolar/ binary Cypriot-Turk registers; politically urgent poetry from the Israeli-Palestinian region by Amir Or, Hava Pinhas-Cohen, Gili Haimovich and others; Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton’s supple art of prose poetry lending a unique Australian colour and diction; the exploration of the rich American and British South Asian diaspora by Moniza Alvi, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Indran Amirthanayagam and Ahilan Packiyanathan; the irony of Kaiser Haq and romanticism of Aminur Rahman from Bangladesh; the magic of the Urdu/Hindustani cadence by India’s Gulzar and Javed Akhtar; Kunwar Narain’s wise philosophical Hindi diction; Adil Jussawalla’s ironic and sparse Mumbai cosmopolitanism and Jayanta Mahapatra deeply-rooted Oriyan metaphors. The signposts are just the tip of the iceberg, acting as a teaser and taste of what you will find inside this volume — in addition to the new/upcoming voices that make the book balanced and truly contemporary. Enjoy the rich and vibrant poetic landscape of Asia.

The Best Asian Poetry 2021-22 (Edited by Sudeep Sen)

Like any proper anthology of short fiction, Asian or not, this one is a celebration of, indeed a valentine to, the short story. One way we know we have read a great short story, as you will here again and again, is the recurrent, delicious mistake of feeling like we have actually just read an entire novel. Short stories are dense and compact; novels are, by definition, loose and baggy. To read a short story in one sitting, as we are so tempted to do here, is to have the artistic equivalent of expanding a compressed computer file: so much life comes pouring out, jack-in-the-box or clown-car style, of these meticulously crafted sentences and scenes. These brave, talented, unforgetable writers from the Philippines, Afghanistan, India, Japan and Singapore have compressed so much life, so much hard-fought wisdom, battered grace, and sweet delight, into these seventeen moving stories in alluring voices.


TBASS2022

The Best Asian Short Stories 2022 (Editor: Professor Darryl Whetter)

Stories from this volume offer a rare glimpse into the lives of a diverse cross-section of the island-state’s residents, and invite us into their most intimate space—home.  Immigrants, migrants, expats, settled generations bring us into their bedrooms, balconies, kitchens and other spaces, their heartaches, traumas, dreams and desires. In so doing, they reshape their life experiences and their relationships with those whom they share their home.

The writers featured in this anthology include Isha B., Azeena Badarudeen, Ilya Katrinnada Binte Zubaidi, Arathi Devandran, Dia Feng-Lowe, Surinder Kaur, Ken Lye, Cecilia Mahendran, Gargi Mehra, Kalpana Mohan, Clara Mok, Payal Morankar, Vanessa Ng Q.R., Rolinda Onates Española, Anna Onni, Anjali Patil, Ranjani Rao, Aparna Das Sadhukhan, Euginia Tan, Audrey Tay and Phyllis Wong.

“A rare glimpse behind the politely but firmly closed doors of the Singaporean heartland, distinguished by its gathering of resident voices across nationalities, ethnicities and creeds,” said Alvin Pang, Ph.D., Poet and Editor, praising this remarkable anthology.

“These stories pack a punch by unpacking familiar themes through intimate scenes and surprising scenarios, regularly hitting too close to home,” remarked Cyril Wong, PhD, Poet & Fictionist, in appreciation of this this volume.

Felix Cheong, Poet and 2000 Young Artist Award (Literature), National Arts Council Singapore, found the anthology “a delightful mix of stories about home, homecoming, homing in on distances that build and separate us.”

About the Editors

Pallavi Narayan has worked in academia and book publishing in Singapore and India. She is a PhD in Literature and holds a Diploma in Creative Writing.

Iman Fahim Hameed has worked in academia in Singapore, is pursuing her MSc in Public Health, reports on global health issues for a UK-based charity, and writes poetry and vignettes.

Singapore At Home

Singapore At Home: Life Across Lines

Pre-order: Singapore At Home: Life Across Lines

Between singing asteroid stations with a secret, and chilling visions of dystopia, between mad sorcerers with an agenda and time-travelling phantoms perplexed by the rules of afterlife, this volume of stories offers a unique sampling of flavours from the infinite breadth of the Asian imagination. If science fiction, horror, and fantasy are the genres you swear by, but miss Asian voices and settings, then this anthology is your oyster. Call these stories speculative, sff, or by any other name, they are really tales well told, and they always take off at a tangent from the big, blustering ‘real’. Here the imaginative spirit is aflame, casting a rich lovely light. Tales from sixteen countries of Asia plus the diasporas. Freshly minted, told by seasoned writers and new talent—a smörgåsbord of Asia's finest speculative imagination.

This volume features stories from 34 stories from 16 countries.

About the Editors

Rajat Chaudhuri has published six books -- Butterfly Effect, Calcutta Nights (translation) Hotel Calcutta, The Best Asian Speculative Fiction (ed), Calculus (in Bengali) and Amber Dusk, . He is the Charles Wallace Creative Writing Fellow (2014) at the University of Chichester, United Kingdom, Hawthornden Castle Fellow (2015) and a Korean Arts Council Fellow (2013) at Toji Cultural Centre, South Korea. Chaudhuri is a past Fellow of the Sangam House International Writers Residency. Chaudhuri's fiction has appeared in Eclectica, Underground Voices, Notes from the Underground, The Statesman, L'Allure des Mots and other snakepits of the international literary underground. He is also a critic and has reviewed fiction for Sahitya Akademi's (India's National academy of Letters) Indian Literature journal, The Asian Review of Books, Outlook, The Telegraph and elsewhere. One of his short stories was the winning entry of the Wordweavers Fiction Contest, 2011. Before turning to writing full-time, Chaudhuri has been a consumer rights activist, an economic and political affairs officer with a Japanese Mission and a climate change advocate at the United Nations, New York. Chaudhuri has also published non-fiction work in the area of water rights and misleading environmental claims in advertising.

Zafar Anjum is a Singapore-based journalist, writer and entrepreneur. For eight years, he was the online editor of Computerworld Singapore, Computerworld Malaysia, CIO Asia and MIS Asia. He is the author of six fiction and non-fiction titles, including the best-selling The Resurgence of Satyam (Random House India, 2012), Iqbal: The Life of a Poet, Philosopher and Politician (Random House India, 2014) and Startup Capitals: Discovering the Global Hotspots of Innovation (Random House India, 2014). He is the director of Kitaab.org.


The Best Asian Speculative Fiction 2018