Tales of Two Cities

edited by Alice Clark-Platts, S. Mickey Lin, Edmund Price, Harmony Sin

featuring stories by Joy Al-Sofi, Reena Bhojwani, Carsten John, Alice Clark-Platts, Irena Cristalis, Lucía Damacela, Magali Finet, Kim Grant, Lawrence Gray, Vanessa Deza Hangad, Trevor Hughes, Marion Kleinschmidt, Nancy KW Leung, Wan Phing Lim, S. Mickey Lin, Shola Olowu-Asante, Rik Powell, Elizabeth Solomon, Sarah Salmon, Bronwyn Sharman, Sebrina Somers, Sharon Tang, Jane Wallace

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Synopsis

Hong Kong and Singapore.
Two cities which encapsulate the buzz and culture of Asia.

23 stories by the Hong Kong Writers Circle and the Singapore Writers Group present four faces of the home cities: the changing city, the historic city, the mystical city, and the capricious city.

These stories take you past the frontages of both cities, through their backstreets and into personal spaces pocketed within the cityscape.

About the Editors

Alice Clark-Platts is a former human rights lawyer who has worked on cases involving the rapper Snoop Dogg and Winnie Mandela. She has won prizes for her fiction and her first DI Erica Martin novel Bitter Fruits was published by Penguin in 2015. She lives in Singapore and has two daughters, Constance and India.

S. Mickey Lin has an MA from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. His writings have been published in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the US. He is the founding co-editor of Swag Literary Journal (www.swaglit.com). For additional information, please check out www.mickeylin.com.

Edmund Price is a published author and an award-winning short-story writer with an MFA in Creative Writing. He was lead editor for the Hong Kong Writers Circle’s 2014 anthology Hong Kong Gothic and was co-editor for its 2009 anthology, Hotel China.

Harmony Sin graduated with a BA in English Literature from the University of British Columbia, Canada in 2011. Harmony is currently working as an English editor at a content provider company. She has been writing short fiction and children’s stories since 2013.

Reviews

“A tour-de-force of variety with cuttingly ironic views of foreigners seen from the viewpoints of cleverly appropriated local characters; pitch-perfect renditions of Hong Kong and Singaporean billionaires, gangsters, property managers, taxi-drivers and reluctant grave-digging progeny; and touchingly straightforward stories of the expatriate's need to fit and find a home in these two supposed global cities.”

—Audrey Chin, author of As The Heart Bones Break, shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize 2014

“There’s no greater entry point to these two cities, rivals but often kindred, than the stories excellently put together in this collection. They depict the obsessions that drive people in Hong Kong and Singapore but also their commonality.”

—Felix Cheong, Young Artist of the Year (Literature) 2000

“An intelligent and important collection of stories that takes you into the minds of outsiders and outliers in Hong Kong and Singapore. Immensely astute observations about the evils of society and the dangers of being complacent in a materialistic world.”

—PP Wong, author of The Life of a Banana

“By collecting stories about the respective cities, The Hong Kong Writers Circle and The Singapore Writers' Group have come together to create Tales of Two Cities for the Asian Century. The result is a collection of terrific fiction that reminds us that despite financial competition and social and political differences, much more connects Asia’s two world cities, its two city states, than separates them.

Whether you have never set foot in Hong Kong or Singapore or whether you have ridden the MTR and MRT a thousand times, pick up Tales of Two Cities. It provides a fascinating portrayal of the transformations, histories and mythologies of these two great metropolises.”

—Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, founding co-editor, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal

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