A yellow elephant appears in an apartment and shakes up the life of a woman unhappy in her marriage. A bored housewife finds herself unsettled by the foreign student who rents a spare room. A single mother goes to great lengths to find out the terrible truth about her teenage son. A teenager discovers a dark, compulsive desire while on a holiday job.
O Thiam Chin, the Frank O'Connor Award longlisted author of Never Been Better, delves into the hidden worlds of people caught in pivotal moments of their lives, in which everything they have held and believed are finally revealed for what they are, inevitably changing the course of their lives. From the breaking of long-held traditions to urban ennui, from the frankly erotic to an aching search for reconciliation, O depicts the strange, complicated facets of love in its different forms through these twelve new incisive and resonant stories.
O Thiam Chin is the winner of the inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize in 2015 for his first novel, Now That It's Over, and his second novel, Fox Fire Girl, was shortlisted for the 2016 EBFP; both novels are published by Epigram Books.
He is also the author of five collections of short fiction: Free-Falling Man (2006), Never Been Better (2009), Under The Sun (2010), The Rest Of Your Life and Everything That Comes With It (2011) and Love, Or Something Like Love (2013). Love, Or Something Like Love was shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize for English Fiction, and Never Been Better and Under The Sun were included in the top ten fiction books in the POPULAR Readers’ Choice Awards in Malaysia.
His short stories have appeared in Mānoa, World Literature Today, The International Literary Quarterly, Asia Literary Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Kyoto Journal, The Jakarta Post, The New Straits Times, Asiatic and Esquire (Singapore). His short fiction was also selected for the first two volumes of The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories anthology series.
O was an honorary fellow of the Iowa International Writing Program in 2010, a recipient of the NAC Young Artist Award in 2012, and has been thrice longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He has appeared frequently at writers festivals in Australia, Indonesia and Singapore.
2 stars. This collection has many good stories in it. I enjoyed "Yellow Elephants". The stories are mostly about family, husband-wife relationship and the ups & downs in marriage.
A bit uneven, but the good stories ("Yellow Elephant," "The Other Woman," "The Cleaner's Daughter," "What Are You Hiding?" and "Sleeping") are REALLY good.