An Ordinary Tale About Women and Other Stories

Author: Fatimah Busu
Translator: Pauline Fan
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 9789815204667
Weight: 
Pages: 224pp
Year: 2024
Price: RM

This collection offers a selection of short stories by Fatimah Busu, one of the foremost Malay women writers of the past century. A master of the short story form, Fatimah Busu is known for her bold subject matter, fresh approach to language, and idiosyncratic style. Her short stories offer an acute portrayal of the inner contradictions of Malay society, particularly the realities of women and men in rural Malaysia grappling with the forces of tradition and modernity, and the frailty of the human condition. The strong subjectivity and agency of women characters in her stories, as well as the unique perspective of children, offers a powerful counter-narrative to the literary landscape of Malay fiction dominated by male writers. Many of Fatimah Busu’s stories are set in her hometown of Kampung Pasir Pekan, Kelantan and are imbued with the vivid peculiarities of Kelantanese dialect, sensibility, and everyday life.

Translated from Malay by Pauline Fan, the ten short stories gathered here span from Fatimah Busu’s early work in the 1960s and 70s, to the height of her creative powers in the 1980s, into her mature period in the 1990s. This collection features a few of Fatimah Busu’s iconic short stories and several lesser known stories which underscore her distinctiveness of style and subject matter. Fatimah Busu’s evocative fiction blurs the boundaries of social realism, dreamscapes, apocalyptic visions, reimagined mythology, and magic realism. The stories gathered here have been translated into English for the first time.