Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  Congratulations to  Rahad Abir  for winning the Georgia Author of the Year Award for literary fiction! We're so proud of you! Past winners include Malcolm Tariq, Ruby Lal, and Natasha Trethewey. The award citation reads: " Bengal Hound  is authentic and complex, and the storytelling skills on display here are impressive. At times the narrative becomes tight and abrupt, a mirror of what is happening with the protagonist. Overall, this is a vividly imagined, smartly edited novel. " At its very core a story of love and loss,  Bengal Hound  traces the turbulent years of East Pakistan that led to a mass revolution, eventually culminating in the creation of Bangladesh. Rahad Abir conjures up characters haunted by memory and trauma in a society reeling from the pains of the Partition of British India. A powerful exploration of the dynamics of nationalism, family, religion, and gender relations, Bengal Ho

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .   Gaudy Boy is proud to publish this astonishing story collection  The Way You Want To Be Loved , by Aruni Kashyap. It is praised by Amitav Ghosh as "poignant, finely crafted." We think you will love it as much as we do. At a New Delhi conference, an Assamese writer is interrogated on why he writes about magical folktales instead of the insurgencies. A mother splashes around in the village lake to mask the lovemaking sounds of her son with another man. A newly-arrived graduate student in Minnesota navigates living arrangements with his white roommate, Mike, and Mike’s Indian girlfriend.  In agile and frank prose,  The Way You Want to Be Loved  tells the stories of queer, displaced lives from India’s Northeast, an underrepresented region in English fiction. A hybrid cast of characters represents the common people in these thirteen stories, whether western-trained academic or village sorcerer, army soldi

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . The Straits Times, Singapore's main broadsheet,  reported  that some Singaporean parents are not sending their children to the US for college because of the ongoing campus protests. One student told the newspaper, "My parents dissuaded me from attending a university in the US because they felt I might get influenced by the culture to protest and get into trouble." A PSA to these parents: Your children do not have to leave Singapore to learn to engage responsibly with the world. Last Friday, 40 students and alumni of Singaporean institutes of higher learning delivered 40 letters to the Ministry of Home Affairs opposing the newly proposed Maintenance of Racial Harmony Bill.  Their letter , a model of reason and clarity even if you don't agree with their stance, deserves an answer from the Ministry. It also shows clearly how student activism around Israel/Gaza has broadened to a critique of censo

 Written in Tamil by Jeyamohan, and translated into English by Priyamvada Ramkumar, these are stories of secular saints who burn with aram, or dharma. Even the religious ones among them are secular in the sense that their care and concern are for the people and animals of this world and not their own spirituality or the afterlife. Their idealism is enmeshed with their lived experience, both brought out so vividly through a passionate yet subtle art. Their stubbornness against adversity and opposition is informed by their knowledge of politics and literature. They give the lie to the idea that goodness is bland. It is, instead, a flaming sword. This is the first work by Jeyamohan that I've read, and I will be on the lookout for others. Please continue to translate him into English! 

  May 15, 2024: A night of readings to commemorate 76 years of the Nakba and to stand in solidarity with Palestine. Nakba Then and Now: Refuse Silence invites you to raise your voice, amplify the Palestinian struggle for freedom, and demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Nakba Day marks the devastation of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 through ethnic cleansing and expulsion of a majority of Palestinian people. Nakba Day is about resisting expulsion and erasure. Today, as we are witnessing another Nakba, the world is also rising up on every continent. This event is part of the Publishers for Palestine coalition's Exist, Resist, Return: A Week of Action for Nakba Day (May 14-21).  Reading by Aidah Masoud, Ibtisam Azem, Najla Said, Huda Fakhredinne, Maaza Mengiste, Valérie Gruhn, Mona Eltahawy, Sean Jacobs, Emna Zghal, Suha Araj, Mukoma wa Ngugi, Christina Dhanuja, Zohra Saed, Christopher Stone, Suneela Mubayi, Hafsa Kanjwal, Omar Berrada, Anna Arabindan Kesson, Jee Leong Koh, Anth

  "Similarly, the poem, for all its labour and craft, is merely one person's understanding of another, possibly misjudged, and one that arguably says more about the writer than the subject. And though this current of self-critique runs through the entire collection, this project of portraiture in verse (in which both interviewer and interviewee curate the details that are meant to present an entire life in short verse) seems too important for the poems to abandon. The subtitle of the collection, 'A Simple History of Singaporeans in America', speaks to this confident ambivalence. Together, the verse portraits form a history of a community, but they remain "simple" – snapshots of particular lives in a particular place. It is a documentary and poetic project with inherent limitations, but nonetheless worthwhile." Thanks, Kristina Tom, for this perceptive review of SAMPLE AND LOOP: A SIMPLE HISTORY OF SINGAPOREANS IN AMERICA. And thanks, Yong Shu Hoong, for