Most Excellent and Lamentable: Selected Stories

by Jason Erik Lundberg, Dean Francis Alfar (Introduction)

Enter the strange mind of Jason Erik Lundberg, hailed by The Guardian for “achieving emotionally resonant effects within just a few pages”. Let his imagination introduce you to an unearthly stargirl, a foul-mouthed wombat, slithering immortals, a fish with premonitions, and much more.

These short stories, painstakingly selected from Lundberg’s first three collections, include a brand-new novelette—“Slowly Slowly Slowly” takes place in a future Singapore where an old folks' home takes the form of an actual zoo—and the author's preferred texts of “The Stargirl and the Potter” and “Ikan Berbudi (Wise Fish)”.

Contents:
The Stargirl and the Potter
Always a Risk
Wombat Fishbone
King of Hearts
Strange Mammals
Great Responsibility
The Time Traveller’s Son
Slowly Slowly Slowly
Kopi Luwak
Complications of the Flesh
Most Excellent and Lamentable
Bodhisattva at the Heat Death of the Universe
Bogeymen
Ikan Berbudi (Wise Fish)

248 pages, Paperback

First published October 3, 2019

About the author

Jason Erik Lundberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, and has lived in Singapore since 2007. Languishing Under Glass, his new novel, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House (Southeast Asia).

His most recent publications are the novel A Fickle and Restless Weapon (2020), the related novella Diary of One Who Disappeared (2019, recipient of a Creation Grant from the National Arts Council of Singapore), and the "greatest hits" short fiction collection Most Excellent and Lamentable: Selected Stories (2019).

He is also the author of many other books for adults—including Red Dot Irreal (2011), The Alchemy of Happiness (2012), Strange Mammals (2013), and Embracing the Strange (2013); books for children—the bestselling six-book Bo Bo and Cha Cha picture book series (2012–2015) and Carol the Coral (2016); and more than a hundred short stories, articles, and book reviews. His writing has been translated into half a dozen languages, and seen publication in venues such as Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, the Raleigh News & Observer, Farrago’s Wainscot, Hot Metal Bridge, Strange Horizons, Subterranean Magazine, The Third Alternative, Electric Velocipede, and many other places. His work has won the POPULAR Readers’ Choice Award, has been shortlisted for the SLF Fountain Award, Brenda L. Smart Award for Short Fiction and SCBWI Crystal Kite Member Choice Award, and was honourably mentioned twice in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

For nearly twelve years, Lundberg was the fiction editor at Epigram Books, where he jump-started the Singaporean publisher's fiction line; many of the over 90 titles he edited there won multiple national awards, and made various year’s best lists. His authors include Boey Kim Cheng, Meihan Boey, Balli Kaur Jaswal, Amanda Lee Koe, Ng Yi-Sheng, Nuraliah Norasid, O Thiam Chin, Jeremy Tiang, Cyril Wong and Daryl Qilin Yam.

In addition, he is the founding editor of LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction (2012–2018), series editor for the award-winning biennial Best New Singaporean Short Stories anthology series (est. 2013), editor of Fish Eats Lion Redux (2022) and Fish Eats Lion (2012), and co-editor of A Field Guide to Surreal Botany (2008) and Scattered, Covered, Smothered (2004). From 2005–2008, he facilitated an occasional podcast called Lies and Little Deaths: A Virtual Anthology.

An active member in PEN America and a 2002 graduate of the prestigious Clarion Writers Workshop, Lundberg holds a Master's degree in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Furthermore, he was a 2025 Visiting Writer at the Asia Creative Writing Programme, and a 2023 International Writer-in-Residence at the Toji Cultural Foundation Residency Program in South Korea. He has served as a prose mentor with the Creative Arts Programme and Ceriph Mentorship Programme, and he currently lectures on contemporary publishing, editorial theory & practice, and creative writing at Nanyang Technological University.

Reviews

[cactus · Rating 4 out of 5]

easy read and loved that it was really a collection of SHORT stories. was going to give it 3 stars initially because the storytelling (not the stories) became really repetitive and flat after a while - wish the author had attempted to switch things up more by employing more creative storytelling or plot/narrative/literary devices, but i chose 4 stars in the end for its commendable range (breadth over depth) and diversity of worlds and characters. as a singaporean and southeast asian, this book was a pleasure to read.

p.s. the author does have this tendency of being way way way too descriptive than necessary. i counted many cases of a sentence being 1 paragraph long (i.e., more than 10 sentences long).

[Tan Clare · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strictly speaking a 3.5. While I am deeply appreciative of the creativity of incorporating elements of Southeast Asian culture and folklore into science fiction (pardon as I still cannot get accustomed to the term "speculative fiction"), this is many done to drive home the collection's unifying theme of existentialism, some went overboard in a manner of tacky gimmick oriental spirituality.

[Imran Shah]

Couldn’t make it to the end. Struggled to keep focus and enjoy

[mantareads · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mercifully short. The book has big font. See Updates.

Maybe my standards are unrealistically high because I just read a collection of Vandana Singh's stories (incidentally and incongruously mentioned in the last story!!).

Look, what do I do with sentences, even ironically applied, like, "Curvy like many Indian women I knew....she'd boasted she could crush peanuts with her ass cheeks"?