Short Stories. This is the most popular form, the most widely published in terms of numbers appearing in authors’ individual collections, in anthologies, periodicals and series. As a service to readers and researchers who might wish to track them through a search, the authors and titles of short stories found in anthologies and periodicals as well as the titles of short stories found in an author’s own collection, are listed under “Contents.” The short story section is also swollen by the potentially controversial inclusion of the many collections and series of ghost stories. But it seems to me, they really cannot be ignored, if only because of their immense popularity. As importantly, these are in the Bibliography partly because they are short stories in form and partly because the ghost stories reflect the varied purposes the form could be made to serve. Significantly, the authors range from an established writer like Catherine Lim (who was among the earliest writers to sense the trend in 1983), the academic, K.K. Seet, and the late esteemed Singapore Literary Pioneer Goh Sin Tub to the popular pseudonymous, punning “Russell Lee” with his “Team of Ghost Writers” and Pugalenthi, Sr. (also known as Pugalenthii) whose output almost rivals that of Russell Lee. Another reason for including them is that they reflect what the fiction-reading public has been most avidly interested in reading since 1989 when Russell Lee’s first collection was the unexpected best seller at the Singapore Book Fair that year.
