Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Barefoot is the Collected Poems of Scottish poet Alastair Reid edited by Tom Pow. I found the book in Barnes & Nobles one evening while browsing the poetry section. The poems are skillful and reflective, sincere and nostalgic, but not terribly memorable, to be honest. The stakes in the poems are not raised very high. Gun Island is my first Amitav Ghosh. I bought it from Book Culture to support the bookstore. The novel is humane and well-plotted, although the writing slips into cliches at times. The protagonist, Deen a rare books dealer, remains a bit of a cipher. The two sections are interesting for me in different ways. The first section is set in the Sundarbans, a mangrove delta of the Ganges that I got to know from Rushdie's Midnight's Children . The second section is set in Venice, which we visited for the first time last summer. I could vouch from my personal experience that the Bengalis have been in that city for a long time: we had dinner at what looked like a ver...

Read this a while back but never got round to blogging about it. It's an absorbing read, with an accumulating power, as secrets are revealed and connections are made. I find the ending of The Emigrants more moving, but the sober ending here has a depth of its own.

SNOW AT 5 PM, my hybrid manuscript of haiku translations and commentary, is on a roll! It has just been longlisted for the 1st [PANK] BOOK CONTEST . This comes after it has been selected as semifinalist for the YESYES BOOKS Open Reading Period . Excerpts have also just been published in the Long Poem Magazine . The contest results will be announced in December. Wish me luck!

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . If you've enjoyed reading this weekly newsletter, would you consider donating to Singapore Unbound's End-of-Year Appeal ? We rely completely on the support of private individuals like yourself, who care for literature and human rights. We can devote all our resources to writers and the presentation of their work because Singapore Unbound is powered by passionate volunteers. All our events are free and open to the public. Many of you have been steady supporters through the years. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Here's to another year of struggle, solidarity, and small victories. Donate Now.  Jee Leong Koh November 22, 2019

On GA's strong recommendation, PN and I watched David Henry Hwang's new play Soft Power at the Public Theater on November 2. It was a very clever, even mind-bending, re-write of The King and I , with a Chinese producer playing the part of a counselor to Hilary Clinton. Some of the dualism depicted by the play were too crude for my taste, such as the opposition between American individualism and Chinese family duty, but it was still fun to see Chinese political culture presented as a viable competing ideology, in some cases, superior to that of the USA. Since right at the start the play criticized the use of the Broadway musical as a vehicle for American soft power, the ending extolling the virtues of American democracy must be viewed with the intended ambiguity. If we felt the appeal of American ideals, we also knew that we were being put upon. In this way, Hwang had his cake and ate it. The party was also about the wonderful number of Asian American actors on stage. They acted...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  "Did your accent hold you back?" The question came from a participant of newyork.sg, a social enterprise that brings young Singaporean creatives to meet artists, entrepreneurs, and media workers in New York in order to deepen their own creative pursuit. Fielding questions from the nine young women, we were a poet, a pianist, and an actress on the panel held in the intensely casual atmosphere of the WeWork lounge in lower Manhattan. What is my accent? Many Singaporeans describe it as American, American friends detect British elements in it, and British acquaintances often pronounce it Singaporean. How can I forget that very uncomfortable incident at the private school on the Upper East Side where I had taught English for 10 years, an incident uncomfortable to all concerned, when a student with a hearing disability said she could not understand my "accent" and asked to be transferred to an...

Last week Film at Lincoln Center screened a retrospective series of restored black-and-white films by Bengali master Ritwik Ghatak. I caught two films: A River Called Titas , an epic about the dying of a village, told in linked stories; and The Cloud-Capped Star , a more domestic film about a young woman who gave her life working for her family. Both films could be described as social realism, but I would rather call them lyrical realism, so beautifully crafted are the images and sequences.

This is one of the few novels by Singaporeans that I did not feel was a duty to read, but a real pleasure. I admire the ambition, not only in its range of characters, settings, times, and scenes, but also in its daring depiction of such well-known historical personages such as Hitler, Goebbels, and Walter Benjamin (in addition to the three female stars, Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Reifenstahl). It could have fallen on its face, but it did not; it throbs with life. The self-awareness invested in Benjamin, in particular, is Shakespearean. If the prologue about the Berlin Press Ball, which brings together the three female protagonists, feels stagey, the reader lives the last days of Benjamin with him as in a dramatic monologue. The novel does own a few non-fatal weaknesses. The slight over-deliberateness in the construction and juxtaposition of scenes. The occasional flamboyance in the language, including distracting puns and wordplay. The chapter titles are coquettish, an...

Weekly column for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . If you can't kill it, I guess you may as well call it Evergreen. Launched in 1957, with work by Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Schorer, and James Purdy, Evergreen Review thrived for 16 years on scandalizing American propriety with audacious writing. Then it went silent for many years before it was revived on-line in 1998, and again in 2017. Now under the leadership of publisher John Oakes and Editor-in-Chief Dale Peck, the magazine has just published the first of four installments of its Fall issue, and is again kicking against the pricks. Headlining the issue is Guatemalan journalist José García Escobar's report on the immigrant caravan traveling from Honduras to the United States. Having embedded himself among the refugees, he was privy to their stories of hardship and to the moral ambiguities of covering them. Looking at the problem from the other end, the American side, Natascha Elena Uhlmann ar...