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Featured at Boing Boing.
Bestseller at Weightless Books for May 2014 and June 2014
This issue of LONTAR presents speculative writing from and about Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand.
Inside these pages, you’ll find:
- a metamorphic love story near the Korean DMZ from award-winner E.C. Myers;
- a brand new supernatural crime tale from bestselling author John Burdett;
- a cautionary tale about Singaporean elitism from Tiffany Tsao;
- an examination of the illusory facets of love from Victor Fernando R. Ocampo;
- a haunting and beautiful evocation of a fantastical Vietnamese floating market from Eliza Chan;
- and speculative poetry from Jerrold Yam, Tse Hao Guang, Ang Si Min, Shelly Bryant and Daryl Yam.
Fiction
The Tiger in the Forest Between Two Worlds
E.C. Myers
What Is Being Erased
Tiffany Tsao
Entanglement
Victor Fernando R. Ocampo
The Floating Market
Eliza Chan
The Apartment
John Burdett
Poetry
Doppelgänger
Jerrold Yam
A Script
Tse Hao Guang
Waiting for the Doctor
Ang Si Min
Naga, A Khmer Myth
Shelly Bryant
Funkytown
Daryl Yam
Interview with E.C. Myers
Q. Your story [“The Tiger in the Forest Between Two Worlds”] takes place near the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea. What was it about this region that inspired you to write about it?
This is a case where the story was shaped a lot by my research and ended up far richer than I first imagined. I wanted to do a contemporary version of the Korean folk tale “The Tiger-Girl,” so I started reading up on Amur tigers, also known as Siberian tigers. It was rather depressing, because there are very few of them remaining in the wild, and particularly in the wilds of Korea. They can be found in the mountains of the north, but they’re absent from the southern peninsula—a shame because the tiger is such an important part of Korean culture.
The more I read about the DMZ, the more fascinated I became, and I decided that if a tiger could still exist in Korea, it would be there; because that territory is largely off-limits to humans, it essentially functions as a gigantic nature preserve. Many references in the story to the DMZ and the cameraman Lim Sun Nam are real, albeit a few years out of date. There’s a free film you can watch online called Tiger Spirit that documents Lim’s quest to find tigers in the DMZ.
Read the entire interview at Weightless Books.