Published in 2013
208 pages
Born in Singapore and currently based in New York, Amanda Lee Koe is the winner of the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize for English Fiction, and the 2016 Singapore Book Award for Best Fiction Title, for her debut short story collection Ministry of Moral Panic. The German translation by Zoë Beck was shortlisted for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s 2017 Internationaler Literaturpreis and the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2017 LiBeraturpreis.
What is this book about?
Meet an over-the-hill Pop Yé-yé singer with a faulty heart, two conservative middle-aged women holding hands in the Galápagos, 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 encompass 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.
