Two Dreams draws together the best of Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s short fiction from nearly three decades, most of it never before available in the United States, and includes important new work. The setting of these sometimes wryly funny, sometimes heartbreaking stories shifts from the war-torn, tradition-bound Malaysia of Lim’s childhood to the liberating, but confusing and often harsh United States of her adulthood. Her memory is undiluted by nostalgia, her ear is perfectly tuned to the voices of both her old country and her new, and her eye is sharp to the special dilemmas faced by girls and women.
Lim is a professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has also taught internationally at the National University of Singapore, the National Institute Education of Nanyang Technological University, and was the Chair Professor at the University of Hong Kong where she also taught poetry and creative writing. She has authored several books of poems, short stories, and criticism, and serves as editor and co-editor of numerous scholarly works. Lim is a cross-genre writer, although she identifies herself as a poet.