By The Book

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.So begins Anna Karenina - and these lines tend to guide a lot of good fiction as well. There just seems to be more to mine from tragedy and conflict than happiness and contentment... so in conjunction with World Happiness Day, we talk about how happiness is written about (outside of the halls of self-help), and the books that make us happy. In our Footnotes, we move on to looking through the longlist of the Women's Prize for Fiction and mull over the value of these awards.

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Short stories have the unique ability to capture our attention, play with language, and tell a story in a brief amount of time; and the best of them always leave us wanting more. We discuss the art of the short story with Malachi Edwin Vethamani, a writer himself and editor of “Ronggeng-Ronggeng: Malaysian Short Stories” - a collection of local stories written over the past six decades that each capture Malaysia (or Malaysianness) in a specific way. To cap things off, we each share our own favourite short story.

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Short stories have the unique ability to capture our attention, play with language, and tell a story in a brief amount of time; and the best of them always leave us wanting more. We discuss the art of the short story with Malachi Edwin Vethamani, a writer himself and editor of “Ronggeng-Ronggeng: Malaysian Short Stories” - a collection of local stories written over the past six decades that each capture Malaysia (or Malaysianness) in a specific way. To cap things off, we each share our own favourite short story.

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In conjunction with International Women's Day, we discuss some of our favourite female writers and their works and also touch on the importance of reading from a diverse roster of voices. And then in Footnotes, we talk about how reading more women is often a result of making active choices, and discuss our own journey towards moving away from reading primarily male authors.

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For February, we take a look at a fantasy novel that received a lot of hype last year, including being shortlisted for a Hugo Award: Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik. A (very) loose retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin story, the novel draws on various familiar fairy tale tropes and then subverts them to tell a wholly unique fantasy adventure - one in which women are complex, diverse, and aren’t always “virtuous”. We wrap things up with a conversation on our favourite offbeat fairy tales and why they’ve stuck with us

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The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning is many things: an account of grief after the loss of a spouse, an introduction to the joy of mushrooms and mushrooming, as well as a story of healing. We speak to Long Litt Woon about writing this deeply personal, moving and unusual first book, and what it's like to be and become a mushroom person.

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For our Valentine’s Day episode, we leave cynicism at the door and dive unabashedly into a discussion on books that replicated, for us, the feeling of being in love. Expect everything from young adult to literary fiction, as we try to break down how the written word makes you fall in love. And because we’re contrary like that, we wrap things up with a discussion on books that expose the ugly side of being in love.

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Upon a diagnosis of cancer, many things tend to come one's way. Specifically, recommendations and advice, not least of all for what you should be eating, and what you should be reading. In this episode of By the Book, we're joined by Dr. Murallitharan Munisamy to discuss the relationship between being a cancer patient (or being part of their family) and books, and give some gentle recommendations of our own.

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Don't judge a book by its cover, they say. And yet of course, that's part of the decision making process for many of us. Lots of thought, work and talent go to creating a memorable cover, and our guest this week knows that better than most. Charis Loke is an illustrator whose work appears in and on books, magazines and games, and she joins us to discuss her process and inspirations. We also talk about the art of making maps for books and our favourite book covers.

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As the movie adaptation of “The Garden of the Evening Mists” hits the cinemas, we speak with the book’s multiple award-winning author Tan Twan Eng - about the book’s journey to the screen, what it feels like to see his characters take a life of their own, and how his story has changed in the process. We wrap things up with a discussion on book characters with a strong sense of “interiority”, and how they translate onto film.

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