My Book of the Year 2020

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here.

For SP Blog’s 7th Annual Books Round-up, 41 Singaporean writers, artists, and thinkers, living in Singapore and abroad, give their favorite read of the year. What is striking in this year’s recommendations is the variety of presses publishing Singaporean works. One of these presses is the new indie comics publisher Difference Engine, which released the recommended SOUND: A Comics Anthology. We may well be seeing a publishing renaissance in Singapore that overcomes the challenges of pandemic publishing. Big thanks to all our contributors who wrote so passionately about their recommendations. We hope you enjoy reading all the contributions as much as we’ve enjoyed compiling them. Please support independent publishers and booksellers by ordering from them directly.

Join us for holiday festivities at Second Saturdays on Saturday, December 12, 7.30 pm ET. Our featured author, multiple award-winning crime writer SJ Rozan, will be reading from her hot-off-the-press novel The Art of Violence (see below). Plus! A mystery guest will join us for a reunion of a very special kind. The discussion after the readings is moderated by yours truly. RSVP Jee at jkoh@singaporeunbound.org for the Zoom link.

Do you know that Gaudy Boy's titles are available in Singapore as well as the US? Our Singapore online bookseller SGBookshelf is offering 20% discount and FREE local delivery with minimum purchase of SGD50 in a single order. Use the promo code GIFT20 to get Lawrence Lacambra Ypil's The Experiment of the Tropics, Jenifer Sang Eun Park's Autobiography of Horse, Paula Mendoza's Play for Time, and Ricco Villanueva Siasoco's The Foley Artist, at reduced prices! Get them for family and friends! If you'd rather just give us a direct donation, you can do so at Fractured Atlas, our fiscal sponsor.

Our team is growing, as you may have observed from the last few newsletters, and we have room for more people who believe passionately in what we are doing for literary exchange and equal rights. Apply to be our Editorial Intern (SP Blog), Publicity Intern (Gaudy Boy), or Student Co-host of the Second Saturdays Reading Series. Details here.

Jee Leong Koh
December 3, 2020

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more