Corridor: 12 Short Stories
Corridor is a collection of short stories all set in present-day Singapore. With unsentimental clarity and heartbreaking honesty, Alfian Sa’at writes about HDB dwellers – students, housewives and factory workers, whose lives begin to unravel once they discover that happiness is a fragile thing in a country obsessed with progress and success.
The characters in each story find themselves in situations that offer them a ticket to hope and change: A video camera transforms the way a resentful daughter sees her widowed mother. A married couple receives free holiday tickets just when their luck seems to have run out. A girl encounters a transvestite on an MRT train ride who tells her that she looks like a famous singer. And a man enters a discotheque after a bitter divorce and re-learns the terror of falling in love all over again.
Rich in authentic detail, with a sensitive ear for the vernacular, Corridor paints an elegiac, revealing portrait of contemporary Singaporeans who exist along the city’s corridors – haunted by lost loves, irrevocable childhoods and a deep longing to be free.
Corridor won the Singapore Literature Prize Commendation Award in 1998.
Paperback
$20.00 SGD
E-book
$20.00 SGD
Reviews
"The magic of Alfian’s writing is no sleight of hand. It’s no illusion. It’s real.” – Haresh Sharma, playwright of Off Centre
“His poet’s eye for freeze framing moments and his command of the language are still very much in evidence in the elegant turns of phrase and the flashes of poetic insight.” – Ong Sor Fern, The Straits Times
“Alfian’s stories are significant as they articulate with a critical eye the concerns of minorities, groups that do not or cannot fit the societal norms.” – Paul Tan, The Straits Times
“What makes Corridor intriguing and yet disconcerting especially to Singaporean readers is its raw honesty in its story-telling that bare the inner struggles of these characters in this increasingly cosmopolitan city-state.” – Yurni Said-Sirhan, Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia
Recommended Books
Fiction
Paperback
$12.00 SGD
E-book
$12.00 SGD
NAME//SAKE conversation cards set
$10.00 SGD
What Gives Us Our Names
Paperback
$24.00 SGD
E-book
$24.00 SGD
Delicious Hunger
Paperback
$22.00 SGD
Sister Snake
Paperback
$24.00 SGD
E-Book
$24.00 SGD
Neverness
Self-ends Book
$22.00 SGD
Augustus Romulus
Paperback
$22.00 SGD
E-book
$22.00 SGD
Nine Yard Sarees: a short story cycle
Paperback
$24.00 SGD
E-book
$24.00 SGD
catskull
Paperback
$22.94 SGD
The Magical Time Capsule
Paperback
$16.00 SGD
E-book
$16.00 SGD
How We Live Now: Stories of Daily Living
Paperback
$14.00 SGD
E-book
$14.00 SGD
Potong: To Care/Cut
Reader
$6.00 SGD
Big Book
$35.00 SGD
Mango the Cat
Reader
$7.00 SGD
Big Book
$50.00 SGD
Fried Eggs
Paperback
$22.00 SGD
E-book
$22.00 SGD
Heartland
Paperback
$20.00 SGD
E-book
$20.00 SGD
Singa-Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore
Paperback
$19.00 SGD
E-book
$19.00 SGD
After the Inquiry
Paperback
$18.60 SGD
E-book
$18.60 SGD
Shezlez the Self-Proclaimed
E-book
$0.00 SGD
Why Our Great Leader was Not So Great and Not Much of a Leader
E-book
$0.00 SGD
The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Singapura
E-book
$0.00 SGD
Found Texts of the AAI Anon, Circa 3119: Eight Lyric Essays
E-book
$0.00 SGD
2719
Paperback
$32.71 SGD
E-book
$32.71 SGD
Memorandum
Paperback
$22.00 SGD
E-book
$22.00 SGD
In This Desert, There Were Seeds
Paperback
$25.00 SGD
E-book
$25.00 SGD
Collected Plays Three
Paperback
$14.00 SGD
E-book
$14.00 SGD
Interpreter of Winds
Paperback
$12.00 SGD
E-book
$12.00 SGD
Giving Alms
Paperback
$22.00 SGD
E-book
$22.00 SGD
The Gods Will Hear Us Eventually
Paperback
$16.00 SGD
Hook and Eye: Stories from the Margins
Paperback
$20.00 SGD
The First Five: A New Collection of Southeast Asian Writing
Out of print
Paperback
$15.00 SGD
E-book
$15.00 SGD
Payoh
Paperback
$18.60 SGD
E-book
$18.60 SGD
Dream Storeys
Board Book
$18.30 SGD
Afternoon Tea at Raffles Hotel
Paperback
$10.00 SGD
Belfast
Paperback
$10.00 SGD
The Cuckoo Conundrum
Gift Box Set
$25.00 SGD
The NTU-NAC Writing Residencies Chapbooks (Gift Box Set)
Paperback
$25.00 SGD
3
E-book (PDF format)
$20.00 SGD
Tales of Two Cities
Paperback
$18.60 SGD
E-book
$18.60 SGD
Blood Collected Stories
Paperback
$18.60 SGD
E-book
$18.60 SGD
These Foolish Things & Other Stories
Paperback
$18.60 SGD
E-book
$18.60 SGD
Cherry Days
Paperback
$18.60 SGD
E-book
$18.60 SGD
First Fires
Paperback
$18.60 SGD
E-book
$18.60 SGD
When a Flower Dies
Reader
$12.00 SGD
My New Monster Truck
Out of stock
Paperback
$18.60 SGD
Lost Nostalgia
Out of stock
Paperback
$9.25 SGD
Afternoon Tea at Raffles Hotel Singapore: A Fun Activity Book
Out of stock
Paperback
$20.56 SGD
this is how you walk on the moon: an anthology of anti-realist fiction
Out of stock
Paperback
$40.00 SGD
Singapore Siu Dai Box Set
Out of stock
Paperback
$13.00 SGD
Singapore Siu Dai 3: The SG Conversation Dabao!
Out of stock
Paperback
$10.00 SGD
Saint
Out of stock
Paperback
$18.60 SGD
A Family Portrait
Out of stock
Out of print
Default Title
$9.90 SGD
Eye/Feel/Write For You
Out of stock
Attunement
Is life hustling you out of tune? As the week roars by, we invite you to a slice of attunement penned lovingly by our authors, friends, and yours truly. Freshly delivered weekly with care. Intimacy guaranteed. Read selected letters below.
Practising Listening
Aug 14, 2025
Our language grows, and with it, new connections to things and creatures around us.
Read more
We Rise and Fall into Spring Blossoms
Jul 23, 2025
For years, pouring myself into this collection was an outlet to make peace with my past and also,...
Read more
Touch Some Grass
May 7, 2025
We’ve traded that sense of freefall for control, but maybe in the process, we’ve lost the autonom...
Read more