Ng Yi-Sheng honors Good Elders and Younger Brothers in this roll-call of books about spirits and spirituality in the modern world.
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Does terrorism derive from ‘tierra’, Spanish for land, or ‘err’, Greek for incorrect, or is it close to ‘terremoto’, Spanish for earthquake? Jonathan Chan reviews Diaries of a Terrorist by Christopher Soto.
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On the menu this month: rojak! Ng Yi-Sheng reviews a collection of randomly themed prose fiction works that caught his interest.
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Bad gays, old gays, crocodile lesbians, the third sex—Ng Yi-Sheng reviews and reveals the diverse, complex, and multifaceted project that is queerness.
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How to solve a murder when you keep forgetting things? Sebastian Taylor reviews The Sleepless, a thrilling work of speculative fiction by Victor Manibo.
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If the sea is allowed to speak, what will it say to us? Genevieve Hartman finds out in reviewing Joanne Leow’s book of poems Seas Move Away.
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To be seen or not to be seen? Christy Ku unravels the tension underlying Chan Li Shan’s unconventional biography of the unconventional Singaporean artist Li Wen.
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For the month of May, Ng Yi-Sheng reviews five works of Southeast Asian speculative fiction that reflect, as he puts it, “the region’s historical fascination with heroes and horrors, plus our happy habit of borrowing from other cultures, whether they’re Indian epics or the tropes of the powers that colonised us.”
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For National Poetry Month, Ng Yi-Sheng rambles through his eclectic library for poetry from different times and places.
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“The Korean-American individual finds themselves mapped onto a kinship network, through which desires are passed down, misplaced, and only very rarely reconfigured,” in Yoon Choi’s Skinship (US: Vintage Books, 2022), reviewed by Aileen Liang.
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For Women’s History Month (March), Ng Yi-Sheng trains his focus on women readers. And men should read these books too.
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Why are so many powerful people such assholes? Kirsten Han reviews Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us by Brian Klaas for some answers from political science.
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In their review of Paul Tran’s All the Flowers Kneeling, Jack Xi shows that Tran’s project is “not to write about survival as purely triumphant or as an ending they have already reached but rather to reflect their real, ongoing journey.”
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In response to N. K. Jemisin’s question “How Long ‘til Black Future Month?” Ng Yi-Sheng reviews five vital works of Black/African speculative fiction.
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Vice-royal-ties by Julia Wong Kcomt, translated by Jennifer Shyue, works against the annihilation and dilution of human experience, as reviewer Niccolo Rocamora Vitug discovers.
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In her review of Ann Ang’s Burning Walls for Paper Spirits (Singapore: Pagesetters, 2021), Mia Ayumi Malhotra appraises the poetry collection and its delicate still-life sketches of construction scaffolding, potted pandans, and laundry-strung balconies.
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To start off the year right, Ng Yi-Sheng reviews five mind-expanding works of non-fiction prose.
Read More“Curled up in bed reading this collection, I imagined that I was attending a Kitty Party and that each of these writers were speaking in a circle with each other, sharing laughter and pain and commiseration.”—Miranda Jeyaretnam on What We Inherit: Growing Up Indian (Edited by Shailey Hingorani and Varsha Sivaram; Singapore: Association of Women for Action and Research, 2022)
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We can’t do it better than Ng Yi-Sheng, who wants you to don now with him your omnisexual apparel and troll some ancient pantheistic carols.
Read MoreIn her review of Vital Signs by Amlanjyoti Goswami (India: Poetrywala, 2022), Samantha Neugebauer takes the measure of the poet’s history of larking.
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