Nineteen: A Collection of Stories by Women, edited by Joan Lau

Here's the thing about me and anthologies by Silverfishbooks - we don't get along for the most part. I bought their first short story anthology, New Writing 1, and was really excited about it. Malaysian literature in English - wow. It was almost unheard of at the time. Plus, I know that JK (Jerome Kugan) of Poetika zine was included in the anthology, and I really like Poetika. So I figured I would like his short story as well, and I did. It was one of the two or three stories in the anthology that I enjoyed. The other stories were certainly well-written, and a lot of them has interesting prose. But as far as plot and character go, they weren't interesting at all.

I've read the other New Writing anthologies since, although I stopped purchasing them. For the most part, my reaction was the same. There would be a couple of stories I liked, while I would find the others barely memorable. I was given Nineteen as a gift - it is the first (and maybe only) collection by Silverfishbooks that contained only women writers. I suppose while my response to the New Writing books was more like, "it was okay", then my reaction to Nineteen is, "it's a little better than okay."

The stories that didn't amaze me were mostly Sex and the City types, which would be enjoyable if they were actually funny, and in the case of one or two stories, not written in pretentious sounding prose (which is another problem I keep having with Silverfishbooks' anthologies). However, the good stories like Charlene Rajendran's Polishing (then again, I've been a fan of Charlene Rajendran since high school), Surenee Somchit's White Lilies, Dina Zaman's Of Fishes and Wishes, and Xu Xi's Go Parents more than made up for the boring ones. Surenee Somchit and Xu Xi's stories in particular were favourites of mine - the characters are so believable. I liked how the relationship between the mother and daughter were portrayed in White Lilies, and I really enjoyed the interactions of the Go family in Go Parents.

If Silverfishbooks came out with a second anthology of writing by women, would I get it? Judging from Nineteen, I think I might. Sure, there would be a lot of tak jadi pseudo-"chick lit" type stories that reads like a creative writing workshop excercise, but if there was even the tiniest bit of a chance that I would find gems like the ones I've found in Nineteen, then I would read every single story to find them.