--SELECTED BY ELECTRIC LITERATURE AS 1 OF 7 SHORT-STORY COLLECTIONS TO READ THIS YEAR--
Longlisted for the 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award
An urgent collection of short stories from one of Singapore's most celebrated voices, now published in America for the first time.
A hijab-wearing schoolgirl who refuses to shake the president’s hand. A woman who joins a dating website for “East-West” connections and instead meets a Muslim French-Canadian man in her Arabic language class. The hantu tetek—a ghost who kills children by squeezing their heads between her breasts. A Malay doctor embarrassed by his Malay patient’s teen pregnancy. A sleeping boy on the bus who awakens a sudden feeling of tenderness in a lonely stranger.
Precise yet universal, grounded yet probing, Malay Sketches gives us a prismatic window into the doubly minoritized Malay-Muslim community in Singapore. Alternating between flash fiction and longer ruminative stories, Alfian Sa’at adopts the role of compassionate and creative demographer, tracing the inner lives of his fictional characters as they navigate individual and collective nostalgias, religious piety and doubt, and issues of class and race.
First published in Singapore, Malay Sketches introduces Alfian Sa’at as a major contemporary author of searing insight, new perspective, and poetic grace to American readers for the first time.

Malay Sketches: Stories

Literature & Fiction

Sa'at, Alfian

United States

Gaudy Boy, LLC

Named 1 of 6 must-read poetry books in April 2019 by The Millions.
The co-winner of the inaugural Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize. 
Through the lens of history and photography, The Experiment of the Tropics returns to early-twentieth-century Philippines during American colonialism and asks, “How does one look at the past?” 
By braiding the music of anthropology with the intimacy of the lyric, Lawrence Ypil explores history’s archives and excavates a city, both real and imagined, that is constituted by the shimmer of petal and porch, coral and brass—a river-refrigerator where women catch their reflections on the sheen of magazines and men lean against the walls of old houses and beckon, come here. So, we approach. 
Spare, musical, and erotic, The Experiment of the Tropics is a meditation on the nature of a city and its longing, the revelatory power of photography, and the startling capacity of poetry to cut into the violent but redemptive parts of history.

The Experiment of the Tropics: Poems

Ypil, Lawrence Lacambra

Poetry

"A collection like a circus of daredevils. . . . A bravura debut.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical NovelA compelling debut for fans of the Filipino America brought to life in fiction by Elaine Castillo and Mia Alvar. 
At once deliciously bizarre and painfully familiar, The Foley Artist introduces a vital new voice to Asian American literature. Ricco Villanueva Siasoco’s powerful debut collection opens new regions of American feeling and thought as it interrogates intimacy, foreignness, and silence in an absurd world. These nine stories give voice to the intersectional identities of women and men in the Filipino diaspora in America: a straight woman attends her ex-boyfriend’s same-sex marriage in coastal Maine; a college-bound teenager encounters his deaf uncle in Manila; Asian American drag queens duke it out in the annual Iowa State Fair; a seventy-nine-year-old Foley artist recreates the sounds of life, but is finally unable to save himself.

The Foley Artist: Stories

Siasoco, Ricco Villanueva

Selected by Vijay Seshadri as the winner of the 2019 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize. "Unimpeachable . . . round and rich and exfoliating with intuition, hesitation, self-questionings, and personhood." --Vijay Seshadri, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, 3 Sections "If you were made to speak a language you labored to make yours, I wrote it for you. If you wished you could unwrite, rewrite, or write in stone or water any number of lifetimes you've endured, I wrote it for you. If you felt that the only home you've known was inside words; if you have written the names of lovers on pieces of paper and burned them in spells; if you understand which words hurt and which heal; if you've begged for more and for mercy, I wrote it for you." In her blistering debut, Paula Mendoza wields the weapon of language as she dismantles the longstanding traditions of the colonial narrative, male speech, and the sentimental love poem. Taking on the forms of historically polarizing figures--the witch, the femme-dom, Eve--the speaker of her poems is both submissive object and powerful agent that wills herself caught between pirate and plunder, that rewrites linguistic scripts to survive oppression, that self-immolates into a state of rebirth, that asks what use or meaning can be made of brokenness and displacement. Playful and deliberate, innovative and strange, Play for Time, Mendoza's debut collection of experimental lyric poems demolishes the literary commonplaces of "universality" and provides a timely introduction to an explosively original voice in poetry.

Play for Time: Poems

Mendoza, Paula

"A series of interlocking short pieces that reach right into your guts and squeeze them, artfully and without mercy." --Ivan Coyote, author of Tomboy Survival Guide Ms. Magazine's "October 2020 Reads for the Rest of Us" Part queer memoir and part poetic rumination, And The Walls Come Crumbling Down lays bare the love, pain, and precarity experienced by those who must forge their own home. &#65279;&#65279;&#65279;&#65279;If home is not a building, what is it? If home is not a place, what is it? If home is not a person, what is it? And the Walls Come Crumbling Down starts in the early 2000s. A young queer woman in Singapore is unable to find safety and refuge in her biological family or country of birth. But she insists on home. She insists on history. She refuses sanitized orderliness and linear perfection, choosing to build a life that embraces the mess and excess of human existence. Presented in radically vulnerable fragments through a hybrid of queer memoir and poetic rumination, De Rozario's And The Walls Come Crumbling Down masterfully lays bare the love, pain, and precarity experienced by those who must forge their own home. This edition, out for the first time in North America, is updated with a new preface from the author.

And the Walls Come Crumbling Down

LGBTQ+ Books

De Rozario, Tania

Biographies & Memoirs

The rescue of a literary manuscript results in a war of words over the interpretation of 107 haiku about New York's Central Park. In the battle of commentaries, what is at stake is nothing less than the meaning of America in an imaginary but highly plausible future. Reenvisioning Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire for a technologized age, Snow at 5 PM discovers revolutionary uses, and abuses, for literature and history.

Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an Insignificant Japanese Poet

Koh, Jee Leong

A commanding force for Southeast Asian speculative fiction, THE INFINITE LIBRARY AND OTHER STORIES reimagines the pasts, presents, and futures of Filipinos and the world around them. This first North American edition features a never-before-anthologized story. "Fantastic and lyrical, like glimpses into the infinite potential of the universe."--Ken Liu, author of THE PAPER MENAGERIE AND OTHER STORIES Shortlisted for the 2018 International Rubery Book Award. Making his North American debut, Victor Fernando R. Ocampo in The Infinite Library and Other Stories shows why Southeast Asian speculative fiction is a force to be reckoned with. From a mysteriously timeless interior of a map shop to a space elevator thousands of miles away from the metropole, these 18 stories masterfully straddle manifold layers of Filipino history, identity, and mythology, reconstructing the past and conjuring new futures for the nation and region at large. Ocampo's transnational consciousness brilliantly navigates class, colonialism, and gender in formal experimentations of winning ingenuity. Threaded by the motif of libraries and books, this deliciously enigmatic and labyrinthine collection showcases the infinite power of imagination to mend and make anew.

The Infinite Library and Other Stories

Ocampo, Victor Fernando R.

Short Stories & Anthologies

Fallen innocents on blood-stained streets. The defiant banging of pots and pans echoing in the darkness. The birth of a springtime revolution amidst the interrupted lives of a country and its people. On the morning of 1 February 2021, a coup d’état was initiated by the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military, effectively overthrowing the democratically elected members of the country’s ruling party, the National League for Democracy, and casting Myanmar into chaos.\nThis volume collects the poetry and prose of the many writers, cultural figures, and everyday people on the ground in Myanmar’s urban centres, rural countryside and in the diaspora, as they document, memorialize, or merely try to come to grips with the violence and traumas unfolding before their eyes. Written in English or translated from the original Burmese the collection includes some of Myanmar’s most important contemporary authors and dissidents, such as Ma Thida, Nyipulay and K Za Win, as well as up and coming authors and poets from all over Myanmar, reflecting the country’s rich cultural and ethnic diversity.\nIn addition, poetry and essays that reflect socioeconomic life of the so-called transitional Myanmar (2010-2020), a period of relative freedom for writers when much of the censorship regime was lifted and the internet and social media were introduced in the country, as well as prominent protest poems and essays, by dissidents Min Ko Naing, U Win Tin and Min Lu, who lived through the hopes and horrors of the 1988 uprising of Myanmar are featured in this volume.\nA feast for the literary imagination, an elegy to those who have fallen, and a courageous act of defiance by those that continue to fight, these firsthand accounts provide an important window into a crucial moment in Myanmar’s history.

Picking off new shoots will not stop the spring: Witness Poems and Essays from Burma/Myanmar (1988–2021)

Thett, Ko Ko

"Spectrally luminous." —Dorothy Wang, Professor and Program Chair, Williams College\nThe winner of the 2021 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize.\nA collection of experiments, mechanical dream logs, epistolaries, and field notes, Time Regime assembles an emergent mutant body intent on interrupting neoliberal imperialism’s rhythms and expectations.\nDisassembling and reassembling the (marginalized) body through the intersecting lenses of ecofeminism and necrosociality, the poems in Time Regime form a poetic fugue that defies regimes of purity and correctness, in an historical epoch demarcated by violence, discipline, and erasure.\nReflecting Jhani Randhawa’s distinct post-deconstructionist impulse, Time Regime navigates the multiplicities of history, time, embodiment, and language to explore queer* phenomenology; postindustrial longing; ritual; and economic, ecological, and spiritual precarity.\nTime Regime traces the lives, ecological contexts, and dreams of multiple beings— rice germ, red ticks, a grandmother’s skin cells, limestone deposits, machine intelligence, shaggy language, the poet, no-self, or the mythological winged cow Surabhi—as they collide and float in parallel vectors. Displaced and seeking, these spectral and material bodies erode and recombine at the edges of domestic ruin, ecological collapse, and state-sanctioned death, delivering an image of presence that seeks communion with mess.\nIn their transcending debut, Jhani Randhawa posits an alternative figuration for the post-modern self—one untethered by oppressive regimes marked by systems of silence—and gives us a body that transforms itself into a site of resistance by bearing witness to our living.

Time Regime: Poems

Randhawa, Jhani

"Everything everywhere all at once, yet intimately, pulsatingly at home." - Yeow Kai Chai, winner of the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize A miraculous gathering of voices from nature, pop culture, and human dictatorship, this "crystalline" collection asks what it means to live in danger, and how to break free. Winner of the 2022 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize The archaeological traces of a snail trail are left on a window, evidence of a fevered, sleepless wandering. A charlatan fortune teller utters prophecies from a coffin of a box. Small moments - the cutting of a butternut squash, the discovery of an octopus in the water - become windows into the tragicomedy of human life. A journey between politics and ecology, Waking Up to the Pattern Left by a Snail Overnight bursts open the shared doors of meditation and madness, of nature and human corruption, throwing the sounds and visions of Taylor Swift, Bjork, Maria Ressa, Mad Max, Japanese anime, and the Marcos dictatorship into an unpredictable dance filled with moments of silence and wonder. Tinged with darkness but never with despair, these poems walk through remnants of grief, destruction, and corruption and toward versions of rebirth, each one a map showing us the way to heal from loss and answer with joy.

Waking Up to the Pattern Left by a Snail Overnight: Poems

Agustin, Jim Pascual

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