SINGAPORE – In this week’s Singapore Shelf, The Straits Times interviews Liang Wern Fook and Felix Cheong, and reviews some recent titles. Buy the books at Amazon. These articles include affiliate links. When you buy through them, we may earn a small commission.
Xinyao pioneer Liang Wern Fook celebrates 60th birthday with English translation of his Chinese book
Xinyao pioneer Liang Wern Fook is celebrating his 60th birthday with many firsts.
Ahead of his first concert collaboration with the Singapore Chinese Orchestra in June, his first book in English translation is now out.
For those who know the revered singer-composer through his mellifluous vocals and heart-warming lyrics, reading the cheeky stories in his micro-fiction collection The Joy Of A Left Hand is likely to cast the Singaporean icon in a new light. The original book was published in Chinese in 2006.
Author Felix Cheong releases bumper crop of seven books in a year after slew of rejections
By happy coincidence, Singaporean poet Felix Cheong will put out a bumper crop of seven books in a year, ranging from poetry to graphic novels to a United Kingdom reissue of his popular humour series, Singapore Siu Dai (2014 to 2016).
But the 58-year-old writer is not taking this windfall of publications for granted.
Between 2017 and 2023, he says, he had received more than 30 rejections from publishers and funding bodies such that he even talked to his wife about giving up.
Along with her encouragement to keep publishing, Cheong – who received the Young Artist Award for Literature in 2000 – decided he had to take things into his own hands and stage his reinvention.
Book review: A gritty family mystery in The Disappearance Of Patrick Zhou
The Zhou family has a long list of enemies, any of whom could have been responsible for Patrick Zhou’s disappearance 15 years ago.
Layla’s grandmother is on her deathbed and her final wish is to know what happened to her eldest son.
A skilled journalist and the only one not involved in the family’s palm oil business, Layla investigates her uncle’s disappearance and realises her family keeps many secrets.
Upon realising some of the darkest ones, she concludes: “The Zhous are morally ambiguous. The Zhous are morally bankrupt.”
Book review: Drawn To Satire pays tribute to Singapore’s cartoonists
Giving long-neglected home-grown cartoonists some love is a great idea.
Drawn To Satire is a long overdue look at the lives of eight Singapore cartoonists. But while the intention might be good, the execution is wobbly, reflecting the pitfalls of attempting to document pop culture history in a country with a short memory and scant respect for art history.
Writer C.T. Lim and artist Koh Hong Teng have collaborated to present a series of creative non-fiction loosely based on the biographies of the cartoonists.
Lim is a long-time pop culture fan who has written extensively on Singapore’s comic book scene, while Koh published Gone Case: A Graphic Novel, Book 1 and Book 2 with writer Dave Chua in 2010 and 2011 respectively.
Book review: The Showgirl And The Minister a noir reimagination of Lim Yew Hock’s alleged Australian affair
Singapore’s pre-Independence chief minister Lim Yew Hock’s reputation is generally one of infamy. He is best known for his tactless suppression of Chinese students’ and workers’ protests during his tenure between 1956 and 1959.
Losing to Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party in the 1959 Legislative Assembly general election, his relevance to Singapore’s history faded.
But this setback shunted, rather than ended, his political career: One unfortunate effect of the neglect of this afterlife is that it has become du jour to forget that he was appointed Malaysian High Commissioner to Australia in 1964. In 1966, he disappeared for 10 days without warning – his photos plastered across Australian news channels – later brought back by a guesthouse operator who claimed he found Lim vomiting in the streets.
Bestsellers: The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers Feb 17
Haemin Sunim’s The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down is No. 1 on the non-fiction bestsellers list.
