Monday

Ministry of Moral Panic
Amanda Lee Koe
SIngapore: Epigram Books, 2013
ISBN: 9789810757328

Meet an over-the-hill Pop Ye-ye singer with a faulty heart, two conservative middle-aged women holding hands in the Galapagos, and the proprietor of a Laundromat with a penchant for Cantonese songs of heartbreak. Rehash national icons: the truth about racial riot fodder-girl Maria Hertogh living out her days as a chambermaid in Lake Tahoe, a mirage of the Merlion as a ladyboy working Orchard Towers, and a high-stakes fantasy starring the still-suave lead of the 1990s TV hit serial The Unbeatables.

Heartfelt and sexy, the stories of Amanda Lee Koe encompasses a skewed world fraught with prestige anxiety, moral relativism, sexual frankness, and the improbable necessity of human connection. Told in strikingly original prose, these are fictions that plough, relentlessly, the possibilities of understanding Singapore and her denizens discursively, off-centre. Ministry of Moral Panic is an extraordinary debut collection and the introduction of a revelatory new voice.

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