The short story is a neglected form. When literary critics and historians construct national literary canons, they often place short fiction as apprentice work to the larger achievement of the novel, which in turn finds its supremacy challenged by new genres in visual or electronic media. Yet the short story deserves attention in its own right; in many parts of Southeast Asia it has been a dominant literary form during crucial historical periods, often coinciding with social transitions that have produced mass literacy in colonial or new national languages. There are many reasons for this. The short story is relatively easy to write and publish in newly founded periodicals; it lends itself to pedagogical projects of language-learning; it arguably readily incorporates more traditional literary forms such as the folk tale; and its length makes it easy to translate in multilingual societies. As the essays collected in Teri Shaffer Yamada's Modern short fiction of Southeast Asia: A literary history illustrate, short fiction has been central to many modern Southeast Asian literary traditions, and E.U. Kratz's description of Indonesian literature as ‘a literature of short stories’ might plausibly be applied to other national and transnational traditions in the region.

Yamada's collection consists of a series of individual essays outlining histories of development of the short story as a literary genre in every Southeast Asian nation-state bar Brunei and Timor Leste. Given the fact that the short story's rise is often associated with growing literacy and the spread of print capitalism, this is also a story of modern nation-state formation, and in particular the formation, prescription and proscription of various forms of national culture. Most of the essays thus provide thoughtful placement of the literary form within socio-political contexts, and many also contain useful discussions of book history as well as more conventional close reading of selected literary texts. While Yamada's book's subtitle is misleading – it does not pretend to present a coherent literary history of short fiction in Southeast Asia – individual chapters do constitute valuable literary histories of the short story in various national languages. Peter Koret's ‘The short story and contemporary Lao literature’, for instance, plots the social context of the genre's development in modern Laos, and provides the valuable service of introducing a literature known to few non-specialists: the chapters on Myanmar / Burma and Cambodia, by Yamada and Anna Allot respectively, are equally valuable in this respect. A variety of critical approaches add interest to discussions of better-known literatures. Susan F. Kepner's rather thin summative essay ‘Thai short fiction of the modern era’ is thus well supplemented by a second essay on contemporary Thai short fiction by Suradech Chotiudompant. Faced with an embarrassment of riches in writing a single chapter on the Indonesian short story, Harry Aveling produces perhaps the best essay in the collection, mixing a historical framework that uses the short story's experience to challenge conventional literary historiography with judicious summary and analysis, and concluding that the short story in Indonesian has both comforted and challenged its readers in its long century of existence.

The copious bibliographical references at the end of chapters, many to works in translation, make the book particularly useful for scholars exploring literary experiences outside those within their immediate area of linguistic expertise. Indeed, university faculty who are asked to teach survey courses of Southeast Asian fiction in translation will find the book invaluable as a resource, supplementing Virtual lotus, Yamada's earlier anthology of Southeast Asian short fiction, referencing a wide variety of short stories from the region, and providing the means to contextualise them in class discussion.

The book's structure thus gives clarity and ease of reference, but it also introduces conceptual difficulties in approaching multilingual national literary canons and the increasing body of transnational writing in and of Southeast Asia. In the case of the Philippines, the challenge is elegantly solved by devoting separate chapters to the short story in English and in Filipino (the latter also, despite its title, also making substantial reference to writing in regional languages). The chapters on Malaysia and Singapore, however, are beset by greater difficulties, given the separate nature of literary traditions in different languages, and their connections with other traditions that cross national borders. The chapter by Shirley Lim and Wong Soak Koon on Malaysia deals well with writing in both Malay and English, but less copiously with Chinese and Tamil. Mary Loh's and Yamada's essay on Singapore makes brief reference to work in other languages, but then focuses on English. The chapter exhibits to a greater extent than others a common failing of essays in the collection: they are slightly dated. Yamada indicates early on in the introductory matter that the essays were first solicited a decade ago. While they have been updated, there is sometimes a need for more radical revision. Loh's conceptual framework would have been standard fare in the middle of the 1990s, but it does not take into account a new generation of scholars writing on Singapore literature in English from the late 1990s onwards, exploring the changed position of English in contemporary Singapore society. The chapter also fails to reference key short story collections published in the period: there is no mention, for instance, of Alfian Sa'at's Corridor (1999), or the short stories of Wena Poon and Suchen Christine Lim.

Modern short fiction of Southeast Asia remains a useful collection of essays, but its subtitle hints at something more: the possibility of writing a coherent literary history of a genre in Southeast Asia that transgresses national boundaries. In her introductory essay, Yamada mentions the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and in particular the notion of the field of literary production, yet the collection simply conceives of Bourdieu's field in national terms. Yamada's brief critique of ‘Western categories’ of literary criticism might be sharpened by interrogating them within a tradition of contemporary Southeast Asian historiography that sees trade and cultural traffic as important as the role of nation-states. What happens if we look, for instance, at the circulation of the products of print capitalism between the Dutch East Indies, the Malay States and the Straits Settlements a century or more ago, or the involvement of Southeast writers of the short story in a variety of regional, pan-Asian and transnational movements after the Second World War? As the individual essays in Yamada's collection show, very few of the writers of short fiction remained impervious to influence from outside a national tradition, and indeed many found inspiration in stories from other nation-states, either in the original language or in translation. Seen in this light, the short story might emerge as a quintessentially Southeast Asian form situated, like the region itself, at the confluence of cultural and economic flows. In turn, this insight might enable a bridge to be made to other contemporary forms: for instance, the current popularity of short ‘indie’ film in the region. The structure of Modern short fiction of Southeast Asia means that such questions cannot be pursued in depth, and the collection thus does not exceed the sum of its national parts. Yet many of these parts individual parts are very good.