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It’s tempting to imagine Prabda Yoon’s short story collection Moving Parts originating as a series of iPhone notes: a scroll-down of speech fragments, draft jokes and random tangents ending mid-sentence Only, since there were no iPhones back in 2002 when this collection was written, better to visualise the stories being tapped out on a Windows 98 desktop computer Like Comic Sans, Yoon’s writing is scrappy, playful and morbid – there is a sense that anything could happen, or as one character puts it, that the ‘world outside could zoom in any direction’   Translated from the Thai by Mui Poopoksakul, these eleven stories all feature protagonists living in Bangkok Together, the stories capture the dislocation of a mushrooming cityscape at the turn of the millennium In a translator’s afterword, Poopoksakul identifies with the generation given voice by Yoon: one whose ‘collective consciousness is tied to the experience of growing up in a fast-urbanising country’ Poopoksakul explains: ‘Prabda and I are both children of 80s Bangkok, old enough to remember the city without a sky train or a McDonald’s, but young enough for these signs of modernisation not to seem out of place when we imagine our hometown’ This rapid change pulled their generation in two directions: ‘hyper-nostalgia’ and ‘hyper-curiosity’ Yoon finds metaphors for this disorientation: young urbanites, gridlocked by traffic, sit in air-conditioned cars watching sodden pedestrians waiting for buses in the rain; across the city, no one can figure out the time: a woman’s wristwatch reads 247; the car’s mini-clock says 242; while the radio display reads 245 The city’s cogs continue to turn, but these inconsistencies breed a subtle discomfort Things are out of joint   Yoon has arranged the book in terms of a strange, contorted body, with each story or ‘part’ corresponding to a section of the human form In ways that are variously surreal, or science-fictional, he explores how it feels to be composed of a jumble of these body parts, and to be subject to their whims: be they faulty or missing; or even seditious, plotting against their owners, getting them in all kinds of trouble The