In this week’s Singapore shelf, The Straits Times reviews a slew of recent releases, including Kyla Zhao’s latest, Valley Verified. Buy the books at Amazon. These articles include affiliate links. When you buy through them, we may earn a small commission.
Singapore writer Mervin Mirapuri’s 100-page poem posthumously published
SINGAPORE – The late poet Mervin Mirapuri had published only a single book of poems in his lifetime and might have been erased from Singapore’s literary history – if not for a stack of manuscripts he left on his wife’s bedside in his last days.
With the posthumous publication of A Walk With My Pig (2023), an epic poem written between 2005 and 2011 that runs close to 100 pages, Mirapuri’s family – who emigrated to Australia in 1988 – is hoping to give him a poetic homecoming.
His elder daughter Dawn, 56, tells The Straits Times on a recent family visit to Singapore: “I knew in my heart it had to be published in Singapore.”
Book review: Valley Verified deftly critiques sexism in tech
Tired of having her story ideas shut down by her snobby boss, New York City fashion writer Zoe Zeng takes a spontaneous and lucrative job offer to be the vice-president of marketing at FitPick, a Silicon Valley start-up that allows users to upload photos of their outfits for others to vote on.
If Zoe succeeds in coming up with the right marketing campaign to catch the attention of investors, gone will be the days of stressing over the perfect outfit for occasions big and small.
The app has promise and no one knows fashion like Zoe, but the cross-country move quickly has her doubting if she is the right person for the job.
The sophomore novel by Singaporean author Kyla Zhao once again delves into the world of fashion and power. Her debut novel The Fraud Squad (2023) follows a working-class woman who infiltrates Singapore’s high society.
Book review: Daryl Li’s The Inventors an unusual but indulgent essay collection on memory and writing
What do a suicidal beggar-monk from Qing Dynasty writer Pu Songling’s Strange Tales From A Chinese Studio, Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan’s 1991 film Center Stage and a dying cat in 2016 have in common?
Not much, but they are drawn together in the rich, sensitive inner world of Singapore writer Daryl Li, whose palimpsestic debut The Inventors proves as daring as it is indulgent, as insistently questioning as it is frustrating.
Li, writing in the creative non-fiction mode – a rare form in Singapore – is obsessed with the inaccessibility of the past, as well as the necessary failure of remembrance and writing.
Just about every single one of the compiled essays here is his po-faced meditation on the subjects.
Book review: Max Pasakorn’s A Study In Our Selves a delicious micro-memoir of many selves
Reading Max Pasakorn’s micro-memoir of questioning selfhood is like sinking your teeth into sticky toffee, as every line spills over with decadent images that tell of a deliciously complex mode of being in between worlds.
Early in the slim 55-page chapbook, Pasakorn writes: “I have learned to err on the side of caution; by which I mean, my kinship with caution is so tight, I feel her stroking my leg hairs into their flat places.”
But Pasakorn’s prose is no kin with caution, as the Thailand-born and Singapore-based writer, 27, has boldly deconstructed the language of memoir to speak about queerness, cultural identity, body image, migration and family dynamics in ways that stretch the genre’s antiquated connotations.
Book review: An ode to found family and childhood innocence in No Room In Neverland
Neverland and Peter Pan are real. Gemma would know, having been brought there by her mother as a child, though no one around her seems to believe it.
Convinced that Neverland has the answers to the mystery of her mother’s disappearance and her father’s abandonment, Gemma finds that the only person who can help might be Cole, a boy she does not remember but who exudes all the magic of Neverland.
Told in chapters that alternate between Gemma and Cole, their connections to Neverland and each other are slowly revealed as their search for the truth forces them to confront more pain than either could have imagined.
In the acknowledgements, Singaporean author Joyce Chua calls this “the book of my heart”, a reflection of herself in the “escapism, loss of childhood innocence, a dark Peter Pan retelling, a girl’s stubborn optimism and a boy’s cynicism all in one”. The words ring true to the story.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers Jan 27
Collide: Embracing Conflict To Boost Creativity by Tay Guan Hin tops the non-fiction bestsellers list.
