The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Beautiful Creatures author in town Posted: 06 Dec 2011 01:24 AM PST MARGARET Stohl and Kim Garcia wrote the bestselling supernatural young adult novels Beautiful Creatures (2009), Beautiful Darkness (2010) and Beautiful Chaos (2011). If you're a fan of the books – and the books have huge numbers of fans, it seems – here's a chance to meet one of the writers in person: Stohl will be coming to Kuala Lumpur this month to meet her fans at the MPH Carnival at the Mid Valley Exhibition Centre. The novels centre around two teens: Ethan Wate, one of his school's most popular guys, and Lena Duchannes, the new girl who is instantly relegated to the unpopular crowd just because she is the niece of the most reclusive and gossiped-about man in their small Southern town. Ethan and Lena make an instant connection – not difficult since Ethan has been dreaming about her before she even came to town! However, as it always is in supernaturally-tinged novels like these, their relationship is a complicated one. For one, Lena and her kin are Casters, beings who have frightening powers. Then there's a dangerous family curse which will come into affect during Lena's upcoming birthday.... Beautiful Creatures' tale of love and belonging has resonated with readers. Since the series' debut in 2009, the novels have been translated into 28 languages in 37 countries. It is even being optioned for film by Warner Brothers. The book was also named the No.1 Teen Pick from Amazon in 2009, and the No.5 Editors' Pick, overall. Stohl, you'd be interested to know, is a longtime veteran of the videogame industry, having worked for Activision (now Activision/Blizzard) and Westwood Studios (now EA, which produces the massively popular The Sims series of games). She has worked on games such as Slave Zero, Apocalypse, Zork Nemesis, Zork Grand Inquisitor, Spycraft, Command And Conquer: Red Alert Retaliation, and Command And Conquer: Tiberian Sun. She lives in Santa Monica, California, and is a graduate of Amherst College, where she won the Knox Prize for English Literature. She has also earned an MA in English from Stanford University and completed classwork for a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. She was mentored by Scottish poet George Macbeth when she attended the creative writing programme of the University of East Anglia, Norwich, Britain. Stohl will be in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday at Kinokuniya Bookstores in Suria KLCC between 3pm and 4pm, and at the MPH Carnival at the Mid Valley Exhibition Centre between 5pm and 6pm. – Elizabeth Tai Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| Posted: 06 Dec 2011 01:22 AM PST In the hurly burly of an economic boom, some people fall through the cracks. DETERMINED to reveal the India behind the glitz and glamour of its economic boom, Sonia Faleiro spent five years immersed in the brothels of Mumbai, befriending bar dancers, transsexuals and policemen. Faleiro, originally from Goa, has lived and worked in India for most of her life. In a culture where "the middle class is the new obsession", she was frustrated by the lack of reportage and representation in the public sphere for marginalised groups. She made a name for herself writing articles about the high incidence of suicide in rural areas among farmers plagued by debt. After watching a TV report about dancers in Mumbai she became keen to learn more and asked a source in the industry if he would introduce her to some dancers. And so she met Leela, the highest paid dancer at a Mumbai club called Night Lovers who would become the subject of her book, Beautiful Thing (Cannongate). Through Leela, readers gain a moving insight into an industry that employed 75,000 women in Mumbai alone, before being outlawed in 2005. In an interview earlier this month in London – she was appearing at the city's DSC South Asian Literature Festival – Faleiro says that she met a number of people who she thought merited a book, but chose Leela for her fighting spirit in spite of her suffering, as the right woman to tell their story. "She was very intelligent, vivacious and aware of how she is perceived, by people in and outside the barline," Faleiro says. "She was interesting to me because I knew that any bar dancer would have suffered a great deal to have got to the point that they were comfortable working in the bar. For Leela to be so joyful, kind and generous made me want to probe further." The encounter turned into five years of friendship intertwined with research for Beautiful Thing, during which Faleiro met Leela's family, friends and an underworld network stretching from politicians to brothel owners. During this time she interviewed women in the early hours of the morning, immersing herself in a subculture of Mumbai that few are aware of to the fullest extent, thriving in the evening, disappearing in the wee hours until the next night. She describes the experience as intimidating, and heartbreaking – but also invigorating. "A lot of very powerful emotions that one doesn't tend to feel on a daily basis, certainly not simultaneously." Leela ran away to Mumbai to become a bar dancer after her father began to sell her into prostitution to local policemen. While the reader might wonder whether to categorise Leela's story as one of exploitation or empowerment, Faleiro says she thinks it is the latter. "When you live in India and work on a story like this, the exploitation is immense and across the board," she says, adding that such stories are countless in India. "But Leela gives you the sense that no matter what life throws at her, no matter how many times it endeavours to hand her defeat, she refuses to accept it, which makes her an incredibly powerful role model considering her background and actual powerlessness." She recalls offering Leela a job with a charity that would have earned her a couple of thousand rupees a month, to which Leela responded: "Is that how much you think I am worth?" Beautiful Thing is part of a growing trend in South Asian nonfiction. Faleiro believes it is a powerful medium that is harder to ignore than newspaper or magazine articles, and finds it surprising that books about the underclass don't constitute a larger share of the genre – "We apparently think that 55% of the population isn't relevant to where we are going." Nonetheless, she is optimistic about her India's future. "It is a remarkable ascent for a country that was so recently independent (since 1947). I would caution that India should look less to its place in the world and more to the position of people within India itself. I'm optimistic but only if we manage our ambitions and responsibilities better." – Reuters Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
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