How far would we go for social justice, and how would that youthful self be viewed afterwards? Lillian Tsay reflects on her involvement in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement in her essay “The Era I Had Loved.”
“In Southeast Asia, poetry is power.” Ng Yi-Sheng reviews five recent collections of Southeast Asian poetry.
A.C.S. Bird explores the many aspects of concealment and revelation in the poetry of Rooja Mohassessy.
What does one do with one’s loneliness? Ratu Yousei finds an answer in this tender story.
Reviewer Samara Choudhury discovers the Bene Israel community in India through Zilka Joseph’s poetry collection Sweet Malida.
In this poignant essay, Monisha Raman finds her way in the maze of grief by walking.
Read and listen to the winners of our 10th Singapore Poetry Contest!
Judith Huang reviews Dinner on Monster Island: Essays, by Tania De Rozario (USA: HarperCollins, 2024).
He is so sure, and she is full of doubts, in this new story, “Chiak Kantang,” by Emilia Ong.
With this set of three watery poems, Jessie Raymundo meditates on what it means to return—to a place, a loved one, or a promise.
For this month’s column, Ng Yi-Sheng explores the short story from different parts of the world.
According to reviewer Suhasini Patni, Usha Priyamvada’s novel Won’t You Stay, Radhika?, translated by Daisy Rockwell, “opens the possibility of inhabiting multiple lives and feeling unhappy in all of them.”
Can we bear to consume beauty in a world seemingly intent on consuming it too? Ananya Shah shows us how she makes peace with her dead.
Ann Ang reviews Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore by Cheryl Naruse (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2023).
To celebrate Pride month, let’s speculate about queer Asian futures with Ng Yi-Sheng as our guide.
What do dating apps, border control, and HRT documentation have in common? Find out in Winter Chen’s explosive movement between the forms and functions that draw a life’s rawest borders.
Anna Tan reviews Bone Weight and Other Stories, by Shih-Li Kow, and finds the stories in the collection weighted down by losses familiar to Malaysians.
Have you ever been late to an appointment, or haunted by someone’s late arrival? Sayan Aich Bhowmik’s poems present us with seasons and people who have taken their time.
Read some creative non-fiction by Southeast Asian authors or about Southeast Asia lately? Ng Yi-Sheng recommends five titles to peruse.
In the wake of a departure, what has – and is – left? Two poems by Oindri Sengupta.
In his review of A Tinderbox in Three Acts, by Cynthia Dewi Oka, Ho Kin Yunn finds a poetics that confronts mass horrors and implicates all of us.
In London, a broken Lim Chin Siong, with the help of his therapist Eileen Tay, tries to step away from the precipice. Philip Holden’s story probes deeply and gently into what it means to “accompany others, and not to oversee them.”
The representative of law and order comes to life in Salil Tripathi’s story. “Was Chin Siong trying to create solidarity between the people and the police to rise up against the government?” Senior Inspector Tan Kim Wah has to decide what to write in his report to his superiors.
A. K. Kulshreshth homes in on the wheeling and dealing to stay on the right side of history in his sharp depiction of an unlikeable protagonist. The man is fictional, but how can one tell amidst the “lies, half-lies, truths, and half-truths”?
In this moving story, Faith Ho imagines the tumultuous events of the 50s from the perspective of Wong Chui Wan. Much more than Lim Chin Siong’s wife, Wong was an activist and a trade unionist at a time when “they [were] writing themselves into being.”
A month of graphic novels? Glorious. Ng Yi-Sheng is our guide to the tragic, the fantastic, and the pandemic.
What are these ghost orchids in Ismim Putera’s new story “Bunga”? Are they even orchids or not?
Like “the signpost that un-alives a robber”, the dangerous side of language is on full display in Samuel Samba’s stunning poems about power, land, pain, and Indigenous lineage.