When the heat and humidity of the current El Nino-charged weather become too much, there is no better escape than retreating indoors with a good book.
With local publisher Shuren Press’ trilingual anthology Eternal Summer Notes, you get 15, in fact. Comprising short stories, poems, essays and translations in English, Bahasa Malaysia and Mandarin, the arty collection is presented as a series of miniature books.
The anthology explores selfhood across time and distance, often with humour and lightness, while bringing together voices from Malaysia, Ukraine, Hong Kong, the United States and beyond.
Featured writers include Shih-Li Kow, Brandon K. Liew, Wan Phing Lim, Amir Hamzah, Md Fariq Khir, Tedd Denis, Aya Carrim, Haiyan Zhang and Anna Morgachova, with translations by Jacqueline Leung and Jennifer Feeley.
Within the collection, you’ll find familiar bits and pieces of Malaysia scattered throughout, from reminiscing over a dear friend who loved durians, notes on the things that make the late Yasmin Ahmad’s movie Sepet a classic and a strange future where you can order a clone of national music icon.
You can pull these mini books out in any order – the authors’ generational differences and distinct literary styles come together to create a collection that is distinct yet complementary.
Born from a three-month “cafe writing residency” at Pohutukawa Coffee in Petaling Jaya in 2024, Eternal Summer Notes celebrates language, place and the fleeting moments we try to hold before they slip away.
By and large, it is not a Malaysia Day project, but it carries a natural sense of place that lends itself to the occasion.
Anthology editor Dano Chow says the residency gave writers the freedom to follow their ideas wherever they led, with the emphasis on bold, experimental work rather than convention.
“For this project, we wanted to capture the ritual of note-taking and create an intimate space that both writer and reader could fully immerse themselves in,” says Chow.
Even the anthology’s packaging, designed by Where’s Gut Studio, reflects this creative vision, with each work presented as a notebook of its own.
“The goal was to offer readers a tactile, personal reading experience, inviting you to engage with the text as individual zines rather than a traditional, perfectly bound book,” he adds.
The curated works were also selected to reflect the rich diversity central to Malaysia’s identity. Rather than standardising the collection in a single language, Chow retained a mix of translated and untranslated works that reflects Malaysia’s multilingual reality.
“As an editor, I wanted to encourage cross-lingual reading, inviting readers to step beyond their comfort zones and encounter works they might otherwise miss, whether in the original language or translation,” says Chow, who also translates from Bahasa Malaysia and Mandarin into English.
Last year, Chow was one of the translators for Objects Of Desire, a Mahua-to-English short story collection launched as part of PEN Malaysia’s series celebrating literary diversity and translation.
Eternal Summer Notes follows a similar path, offering a project designed to appeal to readers across languages and literary sensibilities.
After making the rounds at art book and fanzine events, Eternal Summer Notes has also found a natural home in independent bookshops, where its unconventional format stands apart on the shelves.
“As Malaysians, we’re always navigating everyday spaces where we constantly hear and interact with languages different from our own.
“A unitary national identity isn’t something one can easily point to. Instead, Malaysia exists as a subtle trace, captured within the rhythms and multilingual reality of the book itself,” concludes Chow.
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