英文

'OTHERS' IS NOT A RACE (3RD PRINTING)
by Melissa De Silva
published by Math Paper Press
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What is a Eurasian? Are Eurasians Singaporean? What does it mean to be a Eurasian living in Singapore?

While having existed in Singapore as long as any other community, Eurasians, who comprise less than one percent of the population, still remain a fairly obscure group to many Singaporeans.

'OTHERS' IS NOT A RACE is a tapestry that weaves together the multiple genres of narrative fiction, creative nonfiction, literary food writing and family memoir, to offer insight into the micro-minority Eurasian community through the intensely personal lens of the writer's own experience living and growing up as a Eurasian in Singapore. Throughout are interwoven the themes of memory, loss, language, identity and cultural reclamation.

Similarly, it is a reflective and provocative journey of self-discovery; a journey the reader may also take to explore what it means to exist at the confluence of being Singaporean and being Eurasian, and to interrogate the liminal space between two cultures, Asian and European, occupied by this community

UNINTERRUPTED TIME
by Alvin Pang
published by University of Canberra

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In a series of textured prose currents, Uninterrupted Time assays confluent moments of familial and intimate relations, tracing the mortal body's insistent and at times devastating transitions.

AND THE WALLS COME CRUMBLING DOWN (2ND EDITION)
by Tania de Rozario
published by Math Paper Press

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SOMEWHERE ELSE, ANOTHER YOU
by Tania De Rozario
published by Math Paper Press

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ENDER DELIRIUM (3RD PRINTING)
by Tania De Rozario
published by Math Paper Press

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PECULIAR CHRIS
by Johann S. Lee
published by Math Paper Press

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“...God knows when it all began but I know for a fact that it didn’t begin with Samuel. Just as I don’t believe in beginnings, I don’t believe in an end, and this is one of the reasons why I managed to survive Samuel’s death...”

Funny, poignant, but always honest and thought-provoking, Peculiar Chris is a simple story about complex feelings. About coming of age. About love. About life and death. With subtlety, lucidity and quiet courage, Johann S. Lee weaves an intricate fabric of thoughts and emotions, and portrays a human experience hitherto unexplored in Singapore fiction.

THE MONSTERS BETWEEN US
poems by Jason Wee
published by Math Paper Press

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In his debut poetry collection, Jason Wee returns to ‘1987’, the installation work he first introduced to art audiences at the first Singapore Biennale in 2006.

The monsters Wee renders are present creatures, some cruelly alive, each shadowed by a long tail of mastery and mortality. With interlocking sequences, Wee shifts from Grimm’s stories to the small frail species among us, arriving at the volume’s central sequence, “Unreliable Evidence”. Composed from newsprint, detainee reports, speech transcripts and redacted accounts, this bravura sequence is suffused with the songs of childhood and the anger of unaccounted injustices. We watch and listen to a voice come of age in a time of great superhero comics and romcom movies, pop music and primary schools.

"Engaging and thought-provoking... Wee presents a fresh  and ageless view of the bizarre and the mundane."

— Ovidia Yu

SQ21: SINGAPORE QUEERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
An Oogachaga Publication
by Ng Yi-Sheng
edited by Jason Wee
published by Math Paper Press

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First published in 2006, the groundbreaking collection of coming out stories was the first affirming non-fiction volume accompanied by real names and faces. Written in light, clear prose, SQ21 shows an unabashed straightforward honesty and finds inspiration in the lives of these ordinary Singaporeans.

Though a bestseller that won acclaim as The Straits Times non-fiction book of that year, SQ21 remained out-of-print for nearly a decade. This new reprint comes updates with fresh material – a new interview by Ng Yi-Sheng, and a new foreword by the editor Jason Wee. 

A BOOK OF HIMS
by Ng Yi-Sheng
published by Math Paper Press

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In 2008, Ng Yi-Sheng won the Singapore Literature Prize for Last Boy, a debut collection which explored the poet's coming of age as a gay man. A Book of Hims is a spiritual sequel to this work, written with a voice that has grown older, but remains just as eccentric and reckless as before. Once again, he deals with the topics of male love and spirituality, recollecting current and past romances, odes to mentors and holy figures, as well as experiments with diverse poetic forms, including the haiku, the sonnet, the ghazal and the jueju. Heartfelt, surreal and evocative, these poems are a splendid addition to the growing body of Singapore literature. 

CHASING CURTAINED SUNS
by Jerrold Yam
published by Math Paper Press

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Diving into the ambivalences and contradictions that are as characteristic of a family as her triumphs, Jerrold Yam’s rousing debut poetry collection is a reaction to the precarious tilt from adolescence to adulthood.

The poems—which invoke subjects as diverse as childbirth, celebrity culture and National Service— extend beyond a struggle for acceptance amid the transience of modern Singapore and into the universal territory of teenagehood. Growing up suggests an inexorable shift to adult sensibilities, but this transition is fraught with countervailing tensions of moving on, letting go and leaving behind. Yet, the collection ends with an optimism that is both agonising and courageous in its desperation for hope.

Alternately lyrical and experimental, confessional and incisive, Yam flexes his poetic versatility by combining ruthless introspection and hard-won catharsis. The ensuing redefinition of boundaries, between what must be left unsaid and what seeks reiteration, holds testimony to a voice that is unafraid of frankness—a voice ready to spearhead the next generation of Singaporean literature.

SCATTERED VERTEBRAE
poems by Jerrold Yam
published by Math Paper Press

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Is love born from duty, misplaced ideas of nobility or the thirst for dependence? Jerrold Yam's second poetry collection confronts the very act of creation, wrestling it from family, religion and sexuality—a triptych of forces that bears as much a promise for redemption as a capacity for cruelty and hurt.

This is our game, guessing the worth of things to find every answer lacking.

WHAT HAPPENED: POEMS 1997 – 2017
by Alvin Pang
published by Math Paper Press

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This Selected Poems surveys Alvin Pang's oeuvre over the past two decades, and includes significant new, previously unpublished material. Singapore's 2005 Young Artist of the Year for Literature, Alvin Pang is active internationally as a poet, writer, editor, and translator. He has authored over a dozen books, including several anthologies of Singaporean literature. His poetry has been published worldwide in more than 20 languages.

BELOW: ABSENCE
by Cyril Wong
published by Math Paper Press

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In his third collection of poems, Cyril Wong wrestles with absences behind the everyday hope of recovering new justifications for a more meaningful existence. His poems move from explorations of love to articulating the demands of loss and memory that drive the desire to poetry.

UNMARKED TREASURE
by Cyril Wong
published by Math Paper Press

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A ghost steps out of its body after a suicide and looks back at it in wonder. The poet wonders at his own existence and struggles between actual living and a desire to depart. Recipient of the Singapore Literature Prize, this collection is Cyril Wong’s most personal sequence of poems, held together by memories about family life and intimate relationships, these moments charged with the pain of love, dreams and death and an unflinching exploration of the self.

TILTING OUR PLATES TO CATCH THE LIGHT
poems by Cyril Wong
published by Math Paper Press

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Cyril Wong’s latest collection of poems brings into play his background in music. Reminiscent of a concerto, an orchestra is invoked by poems that celebrate the lives of lovers distant and near, while a single narrative arises like a solo instrument amidst their chords, often blurring a distinction between the universal and the particular. This narrative is a love story that pierces through the shadow of the inevitable, accompanied by dreams and a re-interpretation of the myth of Shiva and Mohini, the fascinating female-incarnation of Vishnu. Interwoven with the motifs of time and death, these poems segue into each other like movements in a symphony, singing of equal parts tragedy and joy.

SATORI BLUES 
by Cyril Wong  
published by Math Paper Press

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Cyril Wong’s longest and only Zen-inspired poem to date, Satori Blues is a response to writings by teachers of Buddhism and post-Buddhist philosophies. Composed as a stream of thought—at times epigrammatic, philosophical, fragmented, even exclamatory—the poem has been described by The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English as ‘a sustained meditation that recalls turn-of-the- century Geoffrey Hill in its intricately patterned probing.’

ONEIROS

by Cyril Wong
published by Math Paper Press

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Cyril Wong's eighth collection hurls the reader into a private dream world; these dreams explore the finitude of the self, recasting the poet's past and shaping the future or daring to mine its dangerous potential. 

AFTERIMAGE
by Werner Kho
published by Math Paper Press

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Afterimage: an image that continues to appear even after the original has ceased. Werner Kho’s debut poetry collection is both personal and yet universal, an exploration of the process of loss and how they come back to us in every different angle.

ARIA AND TRUMPET FLOURISH
by Rodrigo Dela Peña, Jr.
published by Math Paper Press

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In a world inundated by all kinds of texts that can be scanned almost as soon as they’re produced, and that as quickly shimmer away into oblivion, I am overjoyed to sit and read Rodrigo Dela Peña, Jr.’s much anticipated first full-length collection Aria and Trumpet Flourish.

Even while observing the necessary ceremonies that we must accord our living, the poet never forgets “time’s swift tumble,” the “tar-spackled road” or its “hairline cracks.” Unlike the ostentatious noise made by certain kinds of musical and other fanfare, the voice in these poems sings always out of a sense of urgency underwritten by love.

In this collection marked by masterful clarity and dexterous handling of forms (including ghazals, villanelles, abecedarians, and epistolaries), we glimpse monks walking the roads, crowds in the hellish circle of an MRT station at the end of the day, and the ghost of Jose Rizal in the Singapore Botanic Gardens. The poet recalls boyhood breakfasts fortified with bile and innards; and, for all his wandering, turns again and again to little towns and dusty barrios with homely names where a jukebox plays in a noodle shop called Tres Hermanas. He promises us: “This is my devotion: to account for the world’s bounty, its finite grace.// To exalt the flourishing it contains, to ache for what is taken away” (from “Compline”).

These are poems I will want to accompany me through the ordinary and other emergencies of everyday life; through the rest of the year, and beyond. In them, I might hope to learn more about the chrysalis’ secret—how, from its gold wreck of discarded laments, a dying self might help to birth a new one.

- Luisa A. Igloria, author of The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018); Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014); Juan Luna’s Revolver (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), and other books

CAPITAL MISFITS 
by Julie Koh
published by Math Paper Press

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A capsule collection of surreal short stories from one of Australia's rising stars.

A woman arrives on the seventh level of Heaven, only to realise it is a trading floor where the dead swap their karma before rebirth. In a Sydney laboratory, a vagrant participates in cosmeceutical trials in return for a Rolex watch. On an island made out of sugar, a student questions the rule of the benevolent Sugar Daddy. At an open mic night in New York, a zen poet takes the stage and begins to tell the greatest, most devastating joke in the world. In this blackly funny parallel universe, Koh explores the absurdity of a world in which the market has become God.

This special edition of Capital Misfits is illustrated by award-winning New York-based artist, Matt Huynh. 

FROM THE BELLY OF THE CAT
edited by Stephanie Ye
published by Math Paper Press

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Writers and cats have long enjoyed a special affinity, unsurprisingly since both spend much time sitting around and judging people. Discover the Lion City through the eyes of its cats and their humans in From the Belly of the Cat, an anthology of feline tales by some of the city-state’s most exciting writers and notorious cat sympathisers.

For best results, read this book at home on the sofa on a rainy afternoon, with a cup of warm tea within reach, and a cat by your side. 

A TREE TO TAKE US UP TO HEAVEN
by Jordan Melic
published by Math Paper Press

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Kueny isn’t much of a worrier, except maybe when it comes to her father, the Custodian of a Thousand Generations, whose soul is hanging by a thread. But when her brother, Ah Ti, inherits the throne and smashes the Watercress Elixir that preserves her family’s heavenly reign, her worries take on a whole new dimension.

Left with no choice, the siblings set out in search of a new home, embarking on a perilous journey that takes them through 14th century Majapahit and 19th century Malaya, where they encounter a dreamy prince who promises them the world, and end up in a sparkling city that will consume everything they know.

A mix of mythology, history and adventure—think Journey to the West meets Huckleberry Finn—Ah Ti and Kueny’s story is about growing up and finding a place for oneself in the world. It is also a story of Singapore, different from the one commonly told—an attempt to capture a sense of the fullness of time contained in the land and its people.

About this Book

Life’s Little Instructions

Stand tall and hold your head high;

Life is not about pleasing everyone.

Life’s Little Moments

The most memorable moments are most probably

those moments you didn’t give up.

Life’s Little Ironies

Someone calls you their best friend, but will stab you

in your back at the most convenient moment.

Life’s Little Pleasures

Finding joy in the little things that choose to move around us

silently, it may not necessarily hold great value but it’s where

happiness and sweet blossoms bloom.

Who is Jugi?

It could be you,

It could be me,

It could be now,

It could be the future.

Everyone has a right to life;

Everyone has the right to say no.

About the Author

Ace Khong (小鄺) studied Graphic Design at Lasalle College of the Arts, and he graduated in 1999. He became actively involved in design and illustration, and developed himself into a prolific illustrator.

Trained as a graphic designer he never laid back on his laurels, and has finally published a Chinese illustration book named “Jurogic” his first venture into publication.

The main purpose of his book is to make readers aware about everyday matters, and to use metaphors which lead readers to reason differently. In his work, he wishes to inspire his readers to form their own opinions, and to think about the things that really matter in life.

He remains deeply grateful, and would like to expresshis special thanks to many individuals who have supported and shared their views, thus helping him to bring cohesiveness to his work.

Ace Khong’s Inception Zone：www.acekhong.wordpress.com

I enjoyed translating Ace’s book because

I was doing something I had never done before.

He encouraged me to translate his collection in my own words;

It’s truly a magnanimous gesture, and I am very thankful.

　　　　　　——Porphyras Wong (Senior Graphic Desinger, translator)

I WILL SURVIVE (3RD EDITION)
edited by Leow Yangfa
published by Math Paper Press

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What is it like to be gay and experience bullying in school or National Service? How do you deal with being rejected by your family and religious group because of your sexual orientation? How are women's experiences different or similar to men's? What does one go through in an abusive same-sex relationship, or when one loses a partner to suicide? What does a transgender man or woman go through in Singapore? When you have been diagnosed with a life-long illness, how do you continue living?

This collection brings together real-life experiences of love, grace, faith, dignity and courage from 21 ordinary gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in Singapore who have survived extraordinary circumstances.

We will live. We will thrive. We will survive.

Featuring a selection of short stories written between the 1960s and 2000, this collection charts Yeng Pway Ngon's evolution in subject matter and style over time. The earlier stories, written at a time when Yeng was known for his modernist poetry, exude solitude and melancholy, and deal with themes such as the wanton rebelliousness of youth, or the poet's shuttling between death and dream. From the 1970s onwards, he turned his attention to societal concerns— depicting a lonely writer who falls in love with one of his own characters, an unhappy man yearning for life abroad who ends up in a mental hospital, an unemployed man who finds joy in his friendship with a white bird, and another, who worries that he might turn into a flower. Other stories introduce us to a parrot who gets taken to court, an ant enamoured with his silhouette, and a disembodied mouth worshipped by the public. Sarcastic, darkly humorous and surreal, Yeng's writing depicts everyday life in all its absurdism and glory

ALES FROM A TINY ROOM (2ND PRINTING)
by Wayne Rée
published by Math Paper Press

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Two gods sit on a park bench and compare universes. A woman has to find herself after discovering she’s an unwanted clone. A man changes with every city he’s in. An ancient beast hunts a very real monster.

Fourteen stories, taking you from the everyday to the extraordinary. These are the Tales From a Tiny Room.