所有書籍

'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

“We obsess about who they look like - the papa, the mama, a cousin, one or other of grandparents.

Mostly, they look like each other. Or like bugs. Or burritos.”

What does it truly mean to be a grandparent — to care for and nurture young life as you look back on your own, and experience the world afresh through their eyes?

The Art of Being a Grandmother: An Incomplete Diary of Becoming is an honest and heartfelt exploration of self — as a mother, grandmother, visual artist and writer. Following her acclaimed autobiographical play, Still Life (2019) with Checkpoint Theatre, Dana Lam invites you into her world as she chronicles the process of becoming a grandparent through her art and writings. The careful interweaving of candid, meditative journal entries with stunning watercolour and ink renderings of scenes of her daily life deftly captures the unique pleasures and challenges of grandparenthood. Poignant, tender, and funny all at once, this volume will delight readers of all ages with its warmth and wonder.

“Being a mother is, arguably, a choice for some.

Being a grandmother is a decision made for you by someone else.”

A 200-page visual journal by Dana Lam; edited by Huzir Sulaiman, with curation, design and layout by Marc Gabriel Loh.

Author's Bio 

Dana Lam is a visual artist and writer, and an Associate Artist with Checkpoint Theatre. In 2019, she performed her play Still Life, which she developed with Huzir Sulaiman and Claire Wong of Checkpoint Theatre over three years. It included a year of exploration and painting in her studio.

She most recently wrote and performed the erotic monologue Why Not Sex in Not Grey: Intimacy, Ageing and Being as part of the Festival of Women: N.O.W. 2021, directed by Noorlinah Mohamed for T:>Works.

Dana has performed in Jerome Bel’s Gala (TheatreWorks, 2016), Joavien Ng’s Incarnation of the Beast (TheatreWorks, 2015) and Dream Country – A Lost Monologue (Singapore Arts Festival, 2012). Her writing credits include the book Days of Being Wild: GE2006 Walking the Line with the Opposition (Ethos Books, 2006). Her visual art has been shown in the Singapore Art Museum and the Substation Gallery. Her 500-piece installation work When Bellies Speak: You Are Your Own Work of Art was held at Hong Lim Park on 8 March 2015.

Outside of performance, Dana has worked as a newspaper reporter and volunteered with AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research), serving as its President from 2000-2002 and again, from 2009-2011.

SIKIT-SKIT LAMA-LAMA JADI BUKIT
by Annaliza Bakri
published by Math Paper Press

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When physical spaces make way for development, we risk historical amnesia. A place evokes a sense of belonging. It sustains our memory of who we are and where we are in the ebb and flow of humanity. Once lost, it can never be recovered. A person emptied of memory is one floating in an open sea without any anchor.

This anthology revisits lost places in Singapore. But not to reminisce or to evoke nostalgia. These poems express what these places mean to the poets and people who built this nation. They interweave social narratives with a strong desire to combat the loss of our memories, names, buildings, roads, trails, episodes, incidents, everything that is us and ours. They represent hope: of what was then, what we are, and what we can be.

Thought-provoking yet moving, these poems are the hidden gems of our literary tradition, unveiling a piece of our social tapestry with every turn of the page: a shared journey in which one rediscovers a lost fabric of our interwoven history. 

This anthology features award-winning poets such as Cultural Medallion recipients — Mohamed Latiff Mohamed and Suratman Makasan, accomplished poet-painters like Abdul Ghani Hamid and Suraidi Sipan, our brilliant Sufi poet — Johar Buang, as well as young talents such as Zulfadli Rashid and Noorhaqmal Mohamed Noor. Our acclaimed female poets Hadijah Rahmat, Amanah Mustafi and Kamaria Buang, also illuminate this poetic journey. These voices have been nothing but enlightening and empowering as they bear witness to the challenges and concerns of the people in the midst of change and transformation.

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

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.

About the Book

Sex workers in Singapore — and most places around the world — tend to be dehumanised, glamourised or sensationalised by the public and media alike. Rarely do mainstream narratives centre sex workers’ voices and agency. The Missing Anthology presents fifteen bold new voices from sex workers, whose writings resist society’s simplistic assumptions about sex work. In these works, authors recount their lived experiences, share their struggles and triumphs, and imagine different futures for the sex industry.

Born from an open call and writing workshops organised by Project X — the only non-profit organisation in Singapore that provides social, emotional, and health services to people in the sex industry — these pieces daringly experiment with form, genre, and perspective. In these pages, you’ll find two “chickens” discussing their dreams while blowing up a condom; pieces on the dynamics of domme-ing and servicing second-hand hearts; essays on the importance of activism and its obstacles; short fiction exploring fantasies of violent liberation; tender letters to loved ones and younger selves that reflect on their journeys and how far they’ve come.

The Missing Anthology re-centres sex workers’ voices from the margins, bringing them into the conversation about an industry often treated as illicit and taboo. By doing so, it aims to address issues of inequality, social and economic mobility, stigmatization, and safety that are fuelled by misconceptions about sex workers and their profession.

Advance Praise

"I’ve been a sex worker since 2011, and even I found my eyes opened reading this collection. The stories, vignettes, and poems within feel like whispers of secrets, fragments of dreams, or the kind of raw, unfiltered honesty you only get from a deep chat with an old friend. Through the voices of Singapore’s sex workers, this remarkable anthology reveals the incredible diversity of joy, rage, hope, and humanity that exists in our lives.

Too often, others try to tell our stories for us — flattening them into stereotypes or sensationalised clichés. But this collection refuses to let those distant assumptions speak. These are our stories, told in our voices, with all the complexity and richness of lived experience. Reading it was deeply moving, at times heartbreaking, and profoundly real.

It is a rare privilege to see the world through these eyes — to be reminded of the shared, challenging, and beautiful gift of life in all its forms. I am honoured to recommend this work. It is vital, human, and, above all, true."

EVA OH, also known as 'Mistress Eva' — award winning International Dominatrix

"An inter-generational, inter-genre, and inter-spatial exploration of the lives of sex workers and their labour conditions in Singapore. Exciting, intimate, endearing, vengeful, repressed, and cathartic all at once, The Missing Anthology reflects the sweeping diversity of sex workers' experiences, motivations, and lives. From the streets of 80s red light districts in Singapore, the online chat rooms of the aughts, and the transgressive imagination of the empowered millennial, the anthology is a landmark publication that stabs a stiletto heel against the singular story and image of a deliberately misunderstood labour class. The stories of sex workers strain against a society’s ability or inability to accept its own desires and the people who work to fulfil them. This book is as necessary a reading as any about the nation, for behind these stories, the country finds an unwritten one of its own."

DIANA RAHIM — visual artist, writer, community worker and editor of Beyond The Hijab

About the Editors

Vanessa Ho (she/they) joined Project X in 2011 and became its executive director in 2019. Her tenure at Project X has provided her many valuable opportunities to meet and connect with sex workers in Singapore and around the world. She has also written and spoken extensively about sex work, human trafficking, rape culture, and LGBTQ rights in Singapore. Vanessa holds the view that if people can speak about sex, gender, and sexuality in open and in non-judgmental ways, society will become a safer place for everyone.

Raksha Mahtani (they/them) is a researcher-writer-facilitator and vice-president on the board of Project X. Notable contributions include working on the organisation's membership model, the voluntary industry exit programme, and report writing. Their master’s thesis research examines labour market hierarchies in Singapore’s sex industry, with research interests that nestle at the intersections of social inequality, friendship, migration, feminism, and multiracialism. Raksha has been published in rivulet 10 and Exhale, and has also performed spoken word as part of Sekaliwags and Mass Hysteria.

nor (they/them) is the Programmes Manager at Project X. Their favourite part of working at Project X is being able to experience the generosity shown by sex workers in telling their stories. Outside of Project X, nor is a multidisciplinary artist, poet and 1/6th of the Studio Ong collective.

Evocative and detailed, poetic and reflective, "Shaolin and You" takes a plunge into the pugilistic and epic world of Shaolin, bringing readers on a colourful journey to discover an ancient craft rooted in history and tradition.  A tribute and celebration of Shaolin Kung Fu, "Shaolin and You" delves into its history, origins, little complexities and lessons through a delightful feast for the senses - where chapters are stuffed with snippets of art, photographs, poems, anecdotes and illustrations of all things Shaolin.

Author's Bio 

Poon Yew Fai started practising pencil drawing as a serious hobby only after entering the workforce, despite having a love for it while growing up in Singapore. He also enjoys Hong Kong action, Kungfu and Wuxia films, especially those from the mid-1980s to 1990s - widely considered to be the golden age of Hong Kong action films. Yew Fai considers his blending of graphite drawing with digital effects an ongoing personal experiment, and is never quite sure how his next Kungfu artwork could turn out. Shaolin Musings is his first self-published collection of Kungfu artworks.

“The land is furrowed deep with worry. The angsana trees are turning orange with pain.” This collection emerges, squeaking and poorly oiled, from this rubbish heap we’ve all piled up. It revels in the transfixing beauty of this last age of man. These poems have dwelt too close to the nuclear waste facility. These poems have traversed through fields of madness for grains for truth. These poems attempt to wring the last dregs out of language. Anything but Human grasps for a poetry beyond our collective exhaustion.

About the Author

Daryl Lim Wei Jie is a poet, writer and literary critic from Singapore. His first book of poetry is A Book of Changes (2016). He is the co-editor of Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet (2020), the first definitive anthology of literary food writing from Singapore. He was quoted in international media for his tabulation of similar texts in the plagiarism of the cookbook by Sharon Wee by Elizabeth Haigh. His poems won him the Golden Point Award in English Poetry in 2015, awarded by the National Arts Council, Singapore.

Food Republic is a generous serving of Singapore's food culture: from the making and eating of food, to the sale and hawking of it, our love and hate of it, and the effects of its consumption and deprivation.

Food has always been our safe space, our comfort zone: a place where we could freely engage in heated arguments about the best nasi lemak, the most fragrant cendol and whether the standard of the stall has dropped or not. Yet this anthology, featuring more than one hundred literary explorations of our food and food culture, also shows that when people write about food, they often aren't just talking about food but usually about something else, closer to the heart. Or the bone.

Curated from previously published work and selections from an open call, the poems, fiction and non-fiction in Food Republic range from the passionately realised to tantalisingly surreal. Think of it as a buffet, a banquet, an omakase, a smorgasbord, a nasi padang spread, a thali or a rijssttafel – we hope we've assembled one to your taste. Come. Eat.

Some Contributors: Arthur Yap, Leong Liew Geok, Edwin Thumboo, Toh Hsien Min, Wong Phui Nam, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Koh Jee Leong, Lee Tzu Pheng, Joshua Ip, Margaret Leong, Alvin Pang, Catherine Lim, Ng Yi-Sheng, Amanda Lee Koe, Alfian Sa'at, Wong May, Gopal Baratham, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, Yong Shu Hoong, Aaron Maniam, Hamid Roslan, Daren Shiau, Boey Kim Cheng, Theophilus Kwek, Cyril Wong and Jennifer Anne Champion