Friday, October 18, 2013

KL Noir: White

KL Noir: White
Click on the picture to purchase KL Noir: White

This is KL Noir: White, the latest installment in Fixi Novo's ambitious four edition anthology. KL Noir: Red has topped Kinokuniya's chart for months now and after White, there will be Blue and Yellow next year.

I am the editor for this anthology and I hope everyone - or at least most people - will enjoy the 18 stories by 18 Malaysian writers, all of whom are scattered all over the world. I believe most are in Malaysia, which is good because we are doing the launch on Oct 30 at Kinokuniya.

Editing it has been a joy as well as a traumatic experience. A joy to do it and traumatising whenever I find errors in an already-edited proof. But such is the way these things work. Keeps me humble, which is not a good thing. Haha.

You will find tales of the classic crime melodrama: murders both vivid and subtle, nuanced as well as hard violence, time travel and superhero stories, nostalgia, a bit of romance and heaps of passion.

They are all wonderful stories and I am honored to have worked with all these great writers. All their stories are great and all the faults in this book are mine.

I'd love to talk more about the stories, but I believe I'll allow the book to speak for itself, and also to talk about the tales spun more directly during the launch. So I guess I'll write about other things concerning the book.

The cover is inspired by a cigarette pack. I would often meet with the Fixi Novo publisher and every time he'd say, "Think of a cover!"

And I'd smoke away and then we came up with the cover. It's strange now, because I am in yet another attempt to quit smoking, but I guess a cigarette pack is hardboiled enough.

KL Noir: White is available on the Fixi website right now - as in, today - and will hit major bookstores two weeks from now. Please click on the picture to be taken to a page where you can purchase it directly. It is now available at a discounted price, as mentioned on the website.