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‘She returned to the island on Friday, August 16, on the three o’clock ferry. She was wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, plain flat shoes without socks, carrying a satin parasol and a handbag, and her only luggage was a beach bag. In the row of taxis at the dock she went straight to an old model corroded by the sea air. The driver welcomed her warmly and took her jolting across the destitute village, with its mud-walled shacks, palm-thatch roofs, and streets of burning sand beside a sea in flames.’ My @straits_times review of Until August, the “lost” novel of Gabriel García Márquez translated by Anne McLean, has been published; link in bio! #LookingLit Thank you to @vikingbooksuk for this review copy! Photo: @tan.ervin Dress: Tally Book Dress gifted by @joanieclothing #UntilAugust #GabrielGarciaMarquez #BookReview #bookstagram #CinqueTerre #Manarola #JoanieGal

‘Urbs antiqua fuit,’ said the Man. ‘“There was a very ancient city”, Detective. And yet in this case, urbs antiqua est. My point, Detective, is that this very ancient city is not over. It is not in the past. It persists, it endures, it survives. Look at it: another day begins, and the city begins again with it. And as you see there are many who do still believe that it is in my charge that it persists. That it is up to me to bring it safely through each day to nightfall.’ I write so many book reviews - I have at least five due this month alone - that it can begin to feel quite rote. Sometimes, however, along comes a book that enlivens the entire experience, and most recently that book has been Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford’s 1920s alternate-history hard-boiled noir* murder mystery set in a city where Native American people call the shots. Writing this review brought me so much joy. Link in bio to the full review! #LookingLit #VintageStyleNotVintageValues If you want to know more about the fascinating world-building of this novel, check out the posts of @cahokian_jazz, where there is also a Spotify playlist to read the book to (it’s been a great accompaniment to my review process). Meanwhile I reiterate my hope that Cahokia Jazz gets picked up for the screen, and that Chaske Spencer gets cast as Barrow. This would be my dream adaptation. Thank you to Viki at @faber_international for this review copy, and @anjellyho for my faux flapper get-up #CahokiaJazz #FrancisSpufford #bookstagram #bookreview #1920s #noir

‘and here it is that in a moment invisible threads wind themselves around me, butterfly in a spiderweb of the trembling of olive trees, of the glances of sunflowers’ ed ecco che in un attimo invisibili fili a me si asserpano, farfalla in una ragna di fremiti d’olivi, di sguardi di girasoli - from ‘Riviere’ by Eugenio Montale (translation mine, mi dispiace!) [PR] Tally Book Print Midi Tea Dress gifted by @joanieclothing, the perfect brand for #LookingLit 📸 @tan.ervin #JoanieGal #CinqueTerre #Manarola #Liguria #EugenioMontale #bookstagram #NationalPoetryMonth

‘To reach the end of the alley, the sun’s rays must go right down the cold walls, kept apart by arches that cross the strip of deep blue sky. They go right down, the sun’s rays, past the windows placed here and there in disorder on the walls, and tufts of basil and oregano planted in pots on the windowsills, and underclothes hung on washing lines; right down to the pavement, made of steps and cobblestones, with a gutter in the middle for the mules’ urine.’ - from The Path to the Spiders’ Nests by Italo Calvino I wanted to come to San Remo to walk the carrugi of Calvino’s childhood, a warren of narrow, steep streets with bracing arches, typical of the cities perched on the Ligurian coast. His first novel, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, opens in La Pigna, or the Pine Cone, the tangle of streets in the old city; his young protagonist, the motherless street urchin Pin, knows these alleys like the back of his hand and walks through them singing bawdy songs #LookingLit 📸 @tan.ervin #SanRemo #ItaloCalvino #ThePathToTheSpidersNests #LaPigna #bookstagram #Italy

Proof that I can find a Little Free Library anywhere, including in the ghost town of Bussana Vecchia, deserted after a catastrophic earthquake in 1887. A community of artists moved in in the 1950s and their workshops dot the village, which otherwise seems to be stuck in time #LookingLit Photo: @tan.ervin #BussanaVecchia #SanRemo #LittleFreeLibrary #bookstagram #ghosttown #wanderlust

“Is this a honeymoon or a research trip?” “Yes.” I am on my honeymoon! my first stop has been the library of San Remo in Liguria, Italy, hometown of Italo Calvino. The Biblioteca Civica di San Remo houses the archives of Calvino’s parents, the agronomist Mario Calvino and Eva Mameli, who was the first woman in Italy to become a university lecturer in botany #LookingLit Did you know that “honeymoon” in Italian is “luna di miele”(literally “moon of honey”) which is a calque? In fact “honeymoon” is calqued in many languages. Funnily enough “calque” is a loanword (from the French for “tracing” or “imitation”) and “loanword” is a calque (from the German “Lehnwort”). Photo: @tan.ervin, who has been very patient about having his honeymoon hijacked so his wife can potter about libraries and peer at Ligurian architecture #SanRemo #ItaloCalvino #library #bookstagram #biblioteca #booknerd

#ohoreads The Invisible Hotel by Yeji Y. Ham. “What should have been a temporary stay turned permanent. At the end of every wait, there was a door. We each had a room. All of us, waiting. What would come after?” Yewon’s family has bones in their bathtub. Phalanxes, scapulas, collarbones. As long as Yewon can remember, she has had to help her mother wash these anonymous, blackened bones, which belonged to their ancestors. This is not unique to her family. In the South Korean village of Dalbit, every family has a bathtub of bones. In some households, the bones are just ash and have to be handled carefully so they do not wash away down the drain. Women traditionally give birth in the bathtub, bearing a new generation directly onto the bones. Yewon’s family is reeling from her father’s death in a workplace accident. Her sister has moved away to Seoul and become estranged from their mother. Their brother is doing national service at an army base near the precarious border with North Korea. Their mother has sunk into a deep depression and washes the bones all day. In her dreams — and, increasingly, even while she is awake — Yewon finds herself in a hotel. It is eerily dim, full of mouldy carpets and battered furniture, and impossible to find one’s way out of. She knows, however, that she has a key to a room in the hotel, and she dreads the day she has to open that door. Thank you to @definitelybooks for this ARC - full review at link in bio #LookingLit This book focuses on the Korean War of the 1950s, but the horrors of trauma that it presents are perpetuated in today’s wars. Even if a ceasefire were called now and the death toll stopped at 30,000, everyone surviving in Gaza would live with, at the very least, unspeakable trauma for the rest of their lives. That is damage that can never be undone. #TheInvisibleHotel #YejiYHam #bookstagram #bookreview #koreanbook #horrorbooks

MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT FROM DOUBLE CONE HQ. Merch now available at www.doubleconebrewing.co.nz We will be updating with more cool merch in the coming days and weeks. Drop any recommendations of other items you’d love to show off to your mates and we’ll do our best to add it to the line up. #kingston #beermerch #brandambassador #doubleconebrewing #lookinglit

#ohoreads Dethroned by John Zubrzycki, the gripping saga of how hundreds of India’s princely states were convinced/strongarmed in the space of three weeks in 1947 to give up their sovereignty and join an independent India. And I do mean gripping, which is quite a feat given the complexity of the subject and overwhelming amount of detail that has to be packed in.  The book mines the juxtaposition of the absurd wealth of India’s maharajas and the devastating situation many of their people were living in - intense poverty, communal violence erupting across the Punjab and Bengal. ‘If you were a citizen of a state, you might be taxed with an elephant levy if the prince were buying a new elephant; and maharajas buy a lot of elephants,’ reporter Margaret Bourke-White is quoted as saying. There’s a striking scene in which, ahead of Partition, British civil servants frantically burn files containing decades of secret correspondence about the princes - the blackmailing of the maharaja of Kashmir over his Paris affair with a blonde called Mrs Robinson; the ruler of Alwar’s practice of tying widows to trees as tiger bait - and those are just the milder cases.  Zubrzycki has a real knack for sketching a character in a few choice anecdotes, a boon when you have a cast of hundreds to work with: V. P. Menon, the coolie who rose to the highest echelons of the government; Vallabhbhai Patel, the ‘unabashed scoffer’ who would go on to be one of Gandhi’s most trusted lieutenants. I’m especially fascinated by Yeshwant Rao Holkar II, the last maharaja of Indore, who once commissioned Le Corbusier to design him a leopard-skin chaise longue, who married not one but two white American women (divorcing the first for the second) and towards the end was having Indore’s crown jewels smuggled out by private plane to sell them off to Harry Winston. I cannot get enough of this guy. He features a fair bit in these pages - he was among the hold-outs accused of plotting to drive ‘a dagger into the very heart of India’ - and I hope someday we get a whole book just about him #LookingLit Thank you to @hurstpublishers for this review copy!  Dress: @collectifclothing

Happy birthday cousin 🎂🎈🎉🥳💐. I wish you the best as you celebrate 🥂 this day and many more of it. Love Daniel.. 💖 #lookinglit

Happy birthday cousin 🎂🎈🎉🥳💐. I wish you the best as you celebrate 🥂 this day and many more of it. Love Daniel.. 💖 #lookinglit

‘The city’s a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city were sutured into a third thing, a heartish city, and cities are heart-stained, and hearts are city-stained too.’ - China Miéville, Embassytown I passed my upgrade with my chapter on China Miéville’s interstitial city and am now officially a DPhil candidate! This actually happened more than a week ago, but shortly afterwards I fell horribly ill and spent all of Lunar New Year in bed, so I’ve only just got around to posting about it. I wore my mother’s kebaya kota baru with garuda batik - readers of Miéville will recognise why this is relevant - along with @cllregoy’s Massimo Dutti skirt and snake earrings from @spindrift. I was afraid that around this time, the halfway mark, I’d start getting tired of the PhD, and I’m absolutely delighted to discover the opposite: I love my topic, I love the research process, I love teaching and going to seminars and learning, learning, learning every day. Italo Calvino wrote that ‘I segni nascosti sono da cercare, come i funghi’ (Hidden signs should be searched for, like mushrooms) and I’m so excited to find the next mushroom, the next sign, the next revelation, and see where that takes me. This city is a heart, and my heart is city-stained #LookingLit #ChinaMiéville #TheCity&TheCity #Embassytown #PerdidoStreetStation #bookstagram #library #bookshelves #kebaya #batik #phdjourney

*~ Mardi Gras 2024 ~* 💙🧡💚💖 #Drag #DragQueen #DragArtist #PalomaFoxx #LaMas #Bichota #MardiGras #rpdr #Mexicana #LookingLit

The 15th volume of @moveabletype_ucl, our department’s graduate peer-reviewed journal, is finally out! Under the theme of ‘Movement’, it assembles articles on AI, automobiles, audio broadcast, the Asian diaspora, and more. I served as reviews editor for this issue, and it was a delight to see how various reviewers responded to the theme, from @burns.william on Ian Patterson’s ‘ambulatory poetics’ to @doccasstles on the theoryfiction revolution of Gruppo di Nun; or @decadence.and.dark.ages and Alisha Mathers’ discussions of migration in Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith and Asylum by Edafe Okporo. I also reviewed Dance Your Way Home by @_emmalwarren_, which it would have been remiss of a journal themed ‘Movement’ not to cover.  Among the article highlights for me have been Mike Fu’s piece on indie magazines in the Asian diaspora (I previously interviewed Mike for his @bloomsburypublishing translation of San Mao’s Stories of the Sahara, and was pleased to reconnect with him in the editing of this article); and @jjkenyon’s edifying research on E. M. Forster and Louis MacNeice’s India radio broadcasts, which I didn’t edit but enjoyed proofreading tremendously. Many thanks to all the journal’s contributors; our article editors (including @em.a.cav and @damo_walsh) and peer reviewers; and above all editor-in-chief @djlewis and creative editor Ilona Mannan for getting this issue out into the world. Link in bio! #LookingLit (this review copy of Dance Your Way Home was courtesy of @faber_international) #MoveableType #bookstagram #bookreview #bookish #literature #poetry #fiction #nonfiction #academia #academicjournal #DanceYourWayHome #EmmaWarren

#ohoreads Beyond The Door Of No Return by David Diop, translated by Sam Taylor. “Through art, we can sometimes push open a hidden door leading to the darkest part of our being, as black as the depths of a prison cell. And, once that door is wide open, the corners of our soul are so brightly illuminated that our lies to ourselves no longer have an inch of shade in which they can take refuge, as if exposed to the African sun at its zenith.” A young Frenchwoman, Aglae, sits at the deathbed of her father, Michel Adanson, a renowned botanist who neglected her in his pursuit of academic acclaim. Before he dies, he speaks one last word: “Maram.” Aglae, determined to unravel her estranged father’s final mystery, discovers a notebook of his which records a research expedition to Senegal he undertook when he was 23. There, a village head tells him the tale of the “revenant”, a woman called Maram Seck who has done the impossible: she was sold into slavery in America, but has returned alive. Despite the scepticism of his guide, a cocky 15-year-old prince called Ndiak, Adanson decides to seek out the revenant. I hugely admire Diop’s International Booker Prize-winning novel At Night All Blood Is Black for its harrowing force, and so this book, which has none of that, did not enthrall me at first. But then I went back and reread it in “18th-century mode” and came to deeply appreciate its use of multiple frame narratives: it begins with this European Enlightenment perspective (Adanson was a real-life naturalist who authored Histoire naturelle du Senegal), but this then recedes to the edges of the frame; into the centre moves the story of Maram, a redoubtable, resourceful woman who can draw on the power of her faru rab, a spirit protector that takes the form of a giant boa. It subverts the tropes of 18th-century travel writing to chart its own voyage into the dark heart of colonialism. Link in bio to a full review #LookingLit Thank you to @definitelybooks for this review copy! Yellow kebaya formerly @c_topia’s, unlabelled, worn over vintage piña silk dress formerly @rougerooi’s

#ohoreads Baumgartner by Paul Auster, in which the eponymous philosophy professor, in his 70s and nearly retired, lives alone and is haunted by the death of his wife in a seaside accident a decade ago. Her death left him a “human stump”, but even a decade later, his missing limbs flare to life and cause him unbearable pain. Yet there remains a surprising amount of afterlife to be lived: he fumbles a marriage proposal to a younger divorcee; he orders piles of books, which he never reads, to keep up a flirtation with an attractive delivery worker; he begins putting together a selection of his wife’s poems, which she never sought to publish while alive. The name of Baumgartner’s wife was Anna Blume, which is also the name of the protagonist of Auster’s early post-apocalyptic novel In the Country of Last Things. Baumgartner, then, is a novel of last things; its narrator is moving through the aftermath of what he considers to be his true life, the one he shared with Anna. Very little actually happens in this novella, which I would not recommend as a good starting point for people new to Auster. It is for the most part a slow meditation on age and grief, and seems to deliberately withhold a sense of closure - even though Auster, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2022, has suggested this might be his last novel. Full review at the link in bio #LookingLit Thank you to Viki from @faber_international for this review copy!  Outfit: formerly @c_topia #PaulAuster #Baumgartner #bookstagram #bookreview #bookrec #literature #bookishthoughts #booksbooksbooks

This is quite belated, but congratulations to Meira Chand and Suchen Christine Lim on receiving the Cultural Medallion earlier this month! They’re the first women writers in the English language to be recognised by the award since Ho Minfong in 1997. I was honoured to be asked by @nacsingapore to write the article on Meira for their publication (especially since the article on Suchen was written by no less than Assoc Prof Angelia Poon!) It was also a pleasure to work again with @secretmanta_ray, the editor who taught me how to use colons. I first encountered Meira’s writing when I was 14 and would, a decade and a half later, interview her as a journalist; then and now I have been struck by the sheer depth of her historical research and the way she transmutes it into the richness of her fictional worlds. Link in bio to the article in PDF form #LookingLit Congratulations also to @daryllwj for his Young Artist Award! all very well deserved These review copies were courtesy of @marshallcavendish and @straits_times Press #MeiraChand #SuchenChristineLim #CulturalMedallion #AFistfulOfColours #SacredWaters #ADifferentSky #singlit #bookstagram #bookstagramsg #vintage

#ohoreads Red Dust, White Snow by Pan Huiting. "Do you consent to enter into a parallel universe?" In this debut novel, the unnamed narrator, a woman in her 30s, lives alone, has an unfulfilling office job, goes on unfulfilling dates with uninterested men, eats unfulfilling instant meals. She and everyone around her are perpetually online, virtually every aspect of their lives filtered through apps controlled by a single tech conglomerate, Empirean. One day, she receives a mysterious device that offers her a chance to enter a parallel universe. She begins to dream that she is a student at the Academy of Greatest Learning, a school out of Chinese myth where she learns elemental magic and to summon entities to do her bidding. Soon, she becomes absorbed in this alternate universe, preferring it to her drab reality - the mundane world that the red dust (红尘) of the title refers to. I was intrigued by the premise of this book - I always love the suggestion of an otherworldly Singapore at a slant to our own - but alas, it didn't compel me. There's an academic quality to the writing that makes it hard to engage with, and the alternate xianxia universe never feels fully realised, nor particularly original. Though the setting is clearly Asian, it is evident the book has been edited for a Western readership: a character is not referred to by her Chinese name Mingyu but its English translation, Brilliant Jade; there’s also a mention of “indigenous Chinese” clothing which seems to allude to hanfu - if so, that’s an odd way of putting it, to say the least. Thematically the novel aspires to Black Mirror, or No One Is Talking About This, but - as with the narrator's unfulfilling existence - it doesn't get far below the surface. Thank you to @fairlightbooks for this review copy #LookingLit Photo: @tan.ervin Dress: formerly @taliwaz’s - hurray for Karma Shelf circularity! #RedDustWhiteSnow #PanHuiting #singlit #bookstagram #bookreview #booksofinstagram

#ohoreads Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward. 'The tutor is telling a story of an ancient Italian, who is walking down into hell. The hell he travels has levels like my father's house. The tutor says: "'Let us descend,' the poet now began, 'and enter this blind world,'" and his words echo through me. I hear the sighs: the summer wind pushing slant at the house, the wood groaning, but instead of the Italian poet descending into hell, I see my mother toiling in the hell of this house.' Annis grows up enslaved on the Carolina plantation of her white father. Her mother teaches her in secret to fight like her grandmother, a Dahomey warrior sold into slavery after she fell in love with the wrong man. Annis listens in on her half-sisters' lessons on Dante and Aristotle, learns to forage for herbs and medicine and to mind bees. But then Annis' father sells her mother. When a grieving Annis starts a secret affair with another enslaved girl, Safi, he sells them both. Ward's writing has never failed to astound me, and here she spins a haunting, harrowing version of Dante's Inferno as Annis traverses a historical hell - a horrifyingly brutal cross-country march to New Orleans, which looms as 'the grief-wracked city' of an infernal landscape riddled with spirits. Her guide through these circles is no Virgil but Aza, a tempestuous, fickle storm spirit who takes the name and form of Annis' grandmother; the love that drives Annis onward is not an abstract Beatrice but her lost mother. It is a dark journey, but - as with Inferno - one emerges from hell to a sky full of stars. In the dark times of today, when so many are trapped in senseless hells of humanity’s own making in Gaza, Sudan, the Congo and more - I suppose that is what literature offers: the hope, however faint, of those stars. The journey we must make on our own. #FreePalestine #CeasefireNow Thank you to @definitelybooks for this review copy #LookingLit Photo: @c_topia (who also lent me her bee brooch) at Jane Lee’s @stpi_gallery exhibition In Praise of Silence #LetUsDescend #JesmynWard #JaneLee #bookreview #bookstagram #bookrec #bookstoread

This was me when I came home from work on Thursday. I didn’t want to take the makeup off because I think I look so much better with it on. 🔥😍 🔥 #facepainting #facepaint #diadelosmuertos #dayofthedead #lookinglit

#ohoreads Leech by Hiron Ennes. "I don't know if I'm even human, or if I'm only the synthesis of all my infections." In the remote chateau of the mining town of Verdira, up in the wintry north, the only doctor has mysteriously died. An autopsy by the Interprovincial Medical Institute discovers, clinging to the corpse’s left eye, a black, hair-like substance with a life of its own — a parasite. This is troubling for the Institute, because the doctor’s body was already hosting a parasite — them. Now, they have competition. The Institute hive mind has spent centuries possessing promising young hosts, replacing their individual selves to shape them into the perfect physicians. The novel’s narrator is one such doctor, sent up north to replace their dead predecessor in caring for the chateau’s inhabitants: the cantankerous baron; his feckless son Didier; Didier’s hypochondriac wife Helene; and their creepy twin daughters.  The doctor finds an ally in Emile, the chateau’s mute houseboy. But as they race to contain an outbreak of their rival parasite, they must reckon with the dark history of Verdira. (Trigger warnings for body horror and rape.) The post-apocalyptic Gothic world-building is astonishing, all the way down to linguistic details - the language spoken in Verdira is Franco, a corrupted variety of French (thanks @em.a.cav for helping me check that it wasn't medieval), and I could go on about the "ventigeaux", the cannibalistic monsters stalking Verdira, which may be a phonological calque of “windigo”, and what that says about the colonial/ecological parasitism of this ravaged world. Gripping, will worm its way into your brain via your eyeballs. Link in bio to a full review; thank you @blackcrow_pr for this review copy #LookingLit Photo: @tan.ervin at @hunterianmuseum, amid the macabre anatomical collection of 18th-century surgeon John Hunter. I'd like to blithely recommend Halloween reads but reading scary stories is escapism these days, when the real world is so full of horror. Genocide is happening in Palestine, Sudan and the Congo. To be able to transmute our fears into the catharsis of horror fiction is a privilege. I am afraid for the world.

Out here livin #me #blackboymagic #issaavibe #issalook #selflove #lookingfresh #lookinglit #naturalhairlovers #dripordrown #glowing

#ohoreads Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead. "It was a glorious June morning. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the ambulances were screaming, and the daylight falling on last night's crime scenes made the blood twinkle like dew in a green heaven." It is 1971, the start of the disco decade in New York City, and Ray Carney is retired from his double life as a fence for stolen goods. Now he maintains a singular existence as a furniture store owner, an upstanding pillar of the African American community and a family man. But when his teenage daughter May clamours to go to the Jackson 5 concert, Carney is forced to hit up his old criminal contacts for those coveted tickets — and in so doing is drawn back into the city’s gritty underworld. Like Harlem Shuffle, Crook Manifesto has a three-caper structure. In the first, the promise of tickets lures Carney into joining Munson, a crooked white cop, on a hellish escapade involving police corruption and the Black Liberation Army. The second reintroduces Pepper, another Harlem Shuffle veteran, now doing security on a blaxploitation film, Code Name: Nefertiti. When its star vanishes overnight, Pepper is tasked to track her down. In the third act, Carney hires Pepper to investigate a streak of fires across town after one puts his tenant’s son in a coma. Carney suspects arson, commissioned by shady landlords to burn down slum buildings for insurance payouts. Whitehead’s grasp of urbanism is among the finest of anyone working in crime fiction today. The understanding that urban crime is fundamentally spatial in nature, already subtly illustrated in Harlem Shuffle, comes into full force here — the shifting tides of urban decline and renewal; race wars and class struggle; the connections between city churn, capitalism and corruption. It's criminally good city writing, and I can't wait for book three. Link in bio for a full review! #LookingLit Thank you @definitelybooks for this review copy! Photo: @tan.ervin Outfit: mid-century @butchwaxvintage jacket gifted by @rougerooi #ColsonWhitehead #CrookManifesto #HarlemShuffle #CrimeFiction #bookstagram #bookstoread #booksbooksbooks #bookreview #vintage

#ohoreads The Chosen And The Beautiful by Nghi Vo. "When I looked at famous Jay Gatsby, soul gone and some terrible engine he called love driving him now, I could see that for him, the world was always ending. For him, it was all a wreck and ruin, and he had no idea why the rest of us weren't screaming." It's the summer of 1922 and Jordan Baker is one of the chosen and the beautiful, leading a charmed existence flitting and flirting her way through the most exclusive parties and the most thrilling clubs of New York high society. Yet it is not a world she quite belongs in: a queer Vietnamese orphan adopted into a wealthy white family as a whim, she knows her place in these circles is more precarious than it seems. When her childhood friend Daisy invites a cousin, Nick Carraway, for dinner, and Nick mentions his neighbour is the elusive millionaire Jay Gatsby, Jordan is drawn as a spectator into a glittering and inexorable tragedy.  Nghi Vo has a knack for taking already scintillating settings and infusing them with an irresistible magic. In this alternate universe of The Great Gatsby, speakeasies are hidden in dimensions that only the right password will open; socialites drink demon blood; and when they say Gatsby sold his soul, they mean it literally. Jordan is capable of Vietnamese paper-cutting magic - bringing things to life by cutting their shapes out of paper - and employs her skill for Daisy's sake, with haunting consequences. There are acres of Gatsby retellings out there but if you read one let it be this: it captures the magic I felt when I first read Fitzgerald, but opens the story up in a way that someone like me could see herself slipping into it, that somehow makes even more sense than the original. What a splendid read to end this sultry summer on #LookingLit Thank you @definitelybooks for the review copy! Dress: vintage piña (Philippine pineapple silk) that once belonged to @rougerooi, with feathers from @anjellyho #TheChosenAndTheBeautiful #NghiVo #TheGreatGatsby #FScottFitzgerald #bookstagram #bookstagramuk #bookstagramsg #asianwriters #vintage #1920s #flapper

Personal problem #me #attitude #moodiseverything #issalook #issaavibe #lookinglit #blackonblack #blackboymagic

More issues than @vogue #me #darkskinned #glow #drip #blackboymagic #melanindrip #selflove #lookingfresh #lookingclean #lookinglit #issalook #issalook

#ohoreads The Moon Represents My Heart by Pim Wangtechawat. The Wang family has the ability to travel in time. Their powers vary: Joshua, for instance, who grew up in Kowloon Walled City, is only able to travel to past Hong Kong. His wife Lily excels at travelling to specific dates, but only within England, where she was born and raised. Their son Tommy always travels back to London before 1950. His twin sister Eva can go back into the timelines of family members, even ancestors she has never met. None can stay in the past for longer than 24 hours, nor can they go back to before the 20th century — that is, until one fateful day in 2004, when Joshua and Lily attempt to travel to 1899 and never return.  The unexplained loss of their parents haunts Tommy and Eva into adulthood. Eva, an artist, uses her gift to reconnect with the family Joshua left behind in Hong Kong. Tommy falls in love with Peggy, a motherless girl in London’s old Chinatown, whom he first meets aged nine in 1927, then visits repeatedly in the years leading up to World War II — even though theirs is a love made impossible by time. This is a promising novel with a fascinating premise, though I found myself wanting more from it. Too much around the time travel question remains unexplored - why, for instance, is it an ability that seems to occur only in Chinese people? I was also not a fan of the use of enjambment in several chapters.  That said, this isn’t the end for this story - I for one am very excited that @gemmachan is executive producing and starring in a limited series adaptation, and I hope it expands on the world @pim.wangtechawat has painted here. Full review at the link in bio!  #LookingLit Thank you to @jjjamieee at @times.reads for the review copy! Cheongsam: @fivestonesvintage on loan from @rougerooi #TheMoonRepresentsMyHeart #PimWangtechawat #TeresaTeng #bookstagram #bookstagramuk #bookstagramsg #asianwriters #timetravel #vintage #cheongsam

#ohoreads Six Of Crows and Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo. I’m a million years late to the Grishaverse - partly because I had vanishingly little interest in the adventures of Magical Girl Alina Starkov - but I randomly decided to read Six Of Crows one day despite my two mountainous TBRs of Books To Review and Academic Work and I was HOOKED, I put it down on that cliffhanger and literally walked out to get Crooked Kingdom at the nearest library branch that had it, which is something I haven’t done since NLB introduced online reservations. So I’m kind of obsessed now with these crazy kids and their unhinged but actually rather clever heists and their terrible city, which is inspired by Dutch Republic-era Amsterdam but which, in its port city cosmopolitanism and near-religious devotion to commerce at the expense of human rights, oddly puts me in mind of Singapore a century or so ago (minus the colonialism). My one bugbear about these novels is that the characters are said to be teenagers but read to me like young working adults, so I’m just going to think of them as such. They are so not normal about each other and I am 100 per cent here for it. I’m looking forward to seeing how they do the Ice Court Heist in the Six Of Crows spinoff show, especially as they’ve used up so many beats from the books in Shadow And Bone S2. Of course this won’t happen till the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes are over so pay your writers and actors, @netflix! The deal is the deal #LookingLit Photo: @c_topia at @acm_sg, for that port cities vibe - that is a Chatwood vault door from when the Empress Place building housed government offices Dress: 1980s Vintinaro (master tailor Thomas Wee’s first boutique!) from @brokenbraids #SixOfCrows #CrookedKingdom #ShadowAndBone #Grishaverse #LeighBardugo #AsianCivilisationsMuseum #ReadingNationSG

#ohoreads Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías, translated by Heather Cleary. "That's what we are when we're born: meat paste gasping for air, little balls of pink slime that once we're pushed out have no choice but to agglutinate to that other body, the mother's, biting down hard on the teat of life." In a port city where toxic algae in the water results in a deadly red wind that infects anyone it touches, an unnamed woman waits for an ambiguous end. A former copywriter, she quit her job at a content agency after having churned out one too many filler pieces to distract the public from the ongoing catastrophe. Now she works as a caregiver for Mauro, an obese child with an unknown syndrome that afflicts him with insatiable hunger, whose wealthy parents have moved inland to escape the red wind.  Outside of caregiving, the narrator maps her days through her movements around the city, even as cab rides grow staggeringly expensive and walking risks fatal exposure. She pays visits to her distant, dismissive mother and her ex-husband Max, who in a self-destructive moment went out into the red wind and is now dying in the clinic. As the algae creeps closer, food grows scarce and more people flee the city, the narrator conceives of a plan to escape with the money she has saved, yet remains in stasis. There is much in this Uruguayan novel, first published in 2020, that recalls the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic — the empty city like an “egg carton”, the overflowing hospitals, the swiftly widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots. Trías, however, is working in the more abiding vein of ecological horror. What befalls her fictional setting is not far removed from real-life toxic cities around the world, where environmental pollution and economic inequality trap many in crises they cannot escape. Link in bio to a full review #LookingLit Thank you to @scribe_uk for this review copy! Dress: youklubkid #PinkSlime #FernandaTrias #HeatherCleary #ScienceFiction

#ohoreads The Singapore I Recognise by Kirsten Han. This National Day, we're celebrating Singapore. But there exists more than one Singapore: there is a Singapore for citizens and another for migrants, a Singapore for people who toe the party line and another for dissenters, a Singapore for the heteronormative and another for those who identify otherwise. In this memoir/essay collection - Kirsten draws on her work as a journalist and activist to show readers these many Singapores, some of which they may not recognise, and some of which they may, despite their efforts to unsee, already know are there. The essays cover subjects from the depoliticisation of the education system to the death penalty. They untangle the alphabet soup of POFMA, FICA and so on; trace a legacy of civil society in Singapore, from the Old Left quashed by Operations Coldstore and Spectrum, to the young activists who champion LGBTQ+ rights and rally against the climate crisis; and unpack the myriad complexities of this work - of pragmatic resistance and loving critics, of the degrees of complicity we all live with and are constantly navigating. This is intertwined with Kirsten's own journey from apolitical youth to activist; she also recounts, in impressively measured tones, some of the toll that it has taken on her, particularly the online harassment she experienced following her meeting with Mahathir in 2018.  The essays are highly readable, cogently expressed and thoroughly footnoted. You don't have to agree with Kirsten's political opinions to appreciate the gist of what she is arguing for: greater freedom of information, of expression, of being able to present a different opinion or narrative from the state-endorsed one without fear of reprisal. She takes issue with the term "loving critic" - love should not be a condition of the right to criticise - but it's without question that this book is an act of love, for a country that exists despite everything, and a country that does not yet exist, but someday may #LookingLit Thank you to @ethosbooks, for this review copy and for all the work they do in making space #TheSingaporeIRecognise #KirstenHan #SingLit #NationalDay

#ohoreads The House Of Doors by Tan Twan Eng. “Each door pirouetted open to reveal another set of doors, and I had the dizzying sensation that I was walking down the corridors of a constantly shifting maze, each pair of doors opening into another passageway, and another, giving me no inkling of where I would eventually emerge.” In 1921, the British writer W. Somerset Maugham spends two weeks in Penang as the guest of the Hamlyns. At first Willie, who is travelling the world with his secretary and lover Gerald Haxton, finds himself at odds with the lady of the house, Lesley Hamlyn, raised in Malaya and herself unhappy in her marriage with her much older husband Robert. Eventually, however, she reveals to Willie the truth behind two events over a decade ago: the arrival of Sun Yat-sen in Penang to raise funds among the Straits Chinese; and the murder trial of Ethel Proudlock, an Englishwoman who shot a man she claimed was trying to rape her. (These are both real historical events; Maugham fictionalised the Proudlock case and the Hamlyns in his short story collection The Casuarina Tree.) I have always enjoyed Tan’s lush prose; nevertheless I was annoyed with this book for about the first third, and then suddenly it sucked me under. Neither Lesley nor Willie is a likeable narrator, and they espouse the racist/homophobic views of the white colonial class of that era. I also disliked how the speech patterns of local characters were rendered. That said, the moment we went back a decade, the book became something else altogether, a door opening onto another set of doors opening onto another; a fascinating look at how history can be stranger than fiction; at problematic marriages, prejudices and the wounds they open. It’s no Garden Of Evening Mists, but it is a work of complicated beauty #LookingLit Thank you @canongatebooks and @definitelybooks for this gorgeous signed review copy! Photo: @tan.ervin at @peranakanmuseum, featuring a pair of exquisite early 20th-century pintu pagar @bajubyoniatta sarong and unlabelled kebaya courtesy of @c_topia, who is now a qualified Peranakan Museum docent! #TanTwanEng #TheHouseOfDoors #PeranakanMuseum #WeHeartKebaya

#ohoreads Counterweight by Djuna, translated by Anton Hur. "It's way, way up there, even beyond the space elevator station. It's in the counterweight." High tech meets low life in every cyberpunk thriller, but where there's a space elevator concerned, you're living it up while you're going down. The space elevator in question is being constructed into Earth's orbit by the Korean conglomerate LK on the South-east Asian island of Patusan, taking over its government in the process. The narrator, Mac, is a fixer for LK's corporate espionage department. When some terrorists take an interest in an unassuming Korean employee called Choi Gangwu, whose only interests seem to be the space elevator and butterflies, Mac starts digging - and gets embroiled in a conspiracy involving LK's late president, a beautiful astronomer and the company's buried sins. Djuna is the Elena Ferrante of South Korean sci-fi; despite more than 20 years of publishing fiction, they have never revealed their legal name, age or gender. This is their first novel translated into English, and what a wild ride it is! There are underground cities dubbed "viscera" for unsubtle reasons; Worm brain implants and biobots; hard-boiled mercenaries with names like the Green Witch; and of course, the space elevator itself. Djuna draws on the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, but with a critical lens on the imperialism inherent in such projects. It's refreshing to see this shifted into an almost wholly Asian arena - a Korean chaebol exploiting an Indigenous South-east Asian population (Patusan refers to the fictional country created by Joseph Conrad, located somewhere in Indonesia), though the locals are not entirely without agency either. It's propulsively madcap, if a little hard to keep up with at times - Djuna assumes a nimble-minded readership. It's got a Gibson-esque verve - I'm reminded of The Peripheral and Agency, but I like this way more. Between this and Kim Bo-young’s I’m Waiting For You, K-wave in space seems to be the next frontier #LookingLit Thank you to @pantheonbooks for this review copy! #Counterweight #Djuna #AntonHur #KoreanLiterature #ScienceFiction

#ohoreads catskull by Myle Yan Tay. “The rest of me was screaming at me to keep the mask. Because when it hugs my face, it is the only time I can see past tomorrow.” Ram, a junior college student, expects to fail his A-levels. His classmates lob racial microaggressions at him regularly. His parents are troubled by him, while his brother Logan, a hyper-masculine NS man, mocks him relentlessly. He is haunted by the death of his Uncle Arun, a family friend, once a celebrated lawyer who was disgraced, disbarred and finally killed in a drink-driving accident where the driver was never caught. Ram’s only friend is Kass, an intelligent, taciturn fellow outsider whom he has known since childhood. Together, they watch videos of people dying in online forums or explore an abandoned house where they find the rotting body of a cat. When Ram realises Kass’ father is abusing her, however, he decides to take things into his own hands. Soon he becomes a masked vigilante dubbed the Daitya (Bengali for demon), tackling injustices people post about online. Though his intentions are good, the violence he wreaks proves addictive. This simmering debut novel asks what it would mean to be a vigilante in a system as rigidly managed as Singapore. Through Ram's eyes it is transmuted from clean, green garden city to a Gotham or Hell's Kitchen, one where students beat up migrant workers "for practice" and the corpse of a missing domestic worker is found in a closet. (All these cases are based on real-life headlines. I have covered such cases.) This is a nuanced psychological portrait that threads the needle of exploring how vigilante violence might arise without condoning it, and further establishes @myleyantay as one of the most promising young artists on the scene. Link in bio to a full review #LookingLit Photo: @tan.ervin Thank you @ethosbooks for this review copy! #catskull #myleyantay #singlit

On @tan.ervin’s first trip to Paris we engaged in the very romantic activities of visiting a) the catacombs where more than six million people are buried and b) the sewers. Chronicled our little Parisian katabasis for @straits_times Life, drawing on the writings of Victor Hugo, Gaston Leroux, Walter Benjamin and @robgmacfarlane, who have plumbed the depths of subterranean Paris more profoundly than I. Also ft. a cameo by @sunnycatmeow - trust the dentist to notice the lack of mandibles in the ossuaries. Link in bio! #LookingLit Photo: @tan.ervin #Paris #Catacombs #ParisSewerMuseum

#ohoreads Shy by Max Porter. "He stops on the edge of the lawn, where Jamie kicked Nick Fulshaw's head in last term and the police kept asking why nobody saw him lying there bleeding and everyone said again and again Because of the ha-ha." In this slim, strange, sad novella, we spend a few hours in the head of Shy, a troubled teenager who is escaping Last Chance, an old country mansion that might be haunted, but has since been transformed into a boarding school for "very disturbed young men" and is being filmed for a TV documentary. The year is 1995. Shy's rucksack is full of ancient flints, and he is headed for the pond.  Porter does kaleidoscopic work here in this prose-poem, flickering in between a sinuous lyricism (the pond "deceptive, inky-smooth, silent, at ease with its unknown weight”), colloquial conversation, the jargon of social work and therapy, jungle music, documentary voiceovers. Through all this is threaded the fractured inner monologue of Shy, a boy whom most of society has given up on, skittering through time and memory, violent and darkly funny and bleak and, towards the end, looking towards a kind of hope #LookingLit Thanks to Viki of @faber_international for this review copy! Photo: @tan.ervin #Shy #MaxPorter

#ohoreads Owlish by Dorothy Tse, translated by Natascha Bruce. "He imagined all the people already asleep, headed into their dreams, following forks in paths invisible to them during the day. The city had expanded to several times its usual size. It was airier now, its substance transformed into a porous honeycomb; one misstep and he risked falling into one of its holes where he would no longer be able to distinguish space or time, and from which he would never re-emerge." In a city called Nevers, a middle-aged professor starts an extra-marital affair with a doll. Professor Q, 50, dissatisfied with his stagnating university career and his lacklustre marriage, has long nursed a secret fetish for dolls; having acquired a life-size mechanical ballerina, Aliss, he seeks the aid of a mysterious figure he calls Owlish to set them up in a love nest. Is Owlish an “old friend” of Q’s, as he claims, or something else – an alter ego, an avatar of the changing city, or more? Whatever he is, he installs the professor in an abandoned church on a deserted island. There, Q whiles away his days with his mannequin mistress, oblivious to the students vanishing from his classes, the protest marches and the political unrest roiling the city. Nevers, named for a French prison camp where Walter Benjamin was once detained, is a phantasmagorical version of Hong Kong. It is a former colony of the kingdom of Valeria, bordering the authoritarian republic Ksana. Much of this novel unfolds in what is referred to as "the shadow zone", a city beneath the city, somewhere between dream and waking. This novel was a curious case for me: I wanted quite badly for it to be a different kind of novel, a novel about urban possibilities and hidden resistance, and it quite deliberately was not, focussing instead on Q's blinkered obsession with Aliss. This made it frustrating for me to read. I recognise, however, the gift of Tse's writing; when she does take on the urban she does so with fantastic verve. Link in bio to a full review #LookingLit Thanks @faber_international for this review copy! Cheongsam: @goldenscissorcheongsam #Owlish #DorothyTse #NataschaBruce

I will be delivering my first academic paper, ‘“Mind the Gap”: The Invisible City in the Cracks of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere’, this Thursday at @crsfliverpool, the Current Research in Speculative Fiction conference at @livuni. It’s a hybrid conference so you can tune in online if you’d like to listen. Link in bio for more details - I’m on Day 1, Panel 3A: Does the City Sleep? from 3 to 4.15pm #LookingLit #DarkAcademia This photo was taken by @andritei during @tan.ervin and my pre-wedding photoshoot at @kinokuniya_singapore; I did not expect it to one day perfectly illustrate my first research paper on reading the interstitial space of Neverwhere through the lens of Invisible Cities, and I doubt subsequent papers will have such fine accompanying visuals. Styling by @rougerooi, our Priestess of the Fashions and fellow reader of @neilhimself #Neverwhere #NeilGaiman #InvisibleCities #ItaloCalvino

Digging the #DarkAcademia vibes at @labibliothequemazarine, which having been founded in the 17th century is the oldest public library in France! If you like doing your reading beneath the stern scrutiny of several Roman busts, this is the library for you #LookingLit Photo: @tan.ervin #BibliothequeMazarine #LibrariesOfTheWorld

@librairie_jousseaume in @galerievivienne - the loveliest bookstore in the loveliest arcade in Paris, founded in 1826 - it actually straddles the arcade where it bends. “Lining both sides of the corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need.” - Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project #LookingLit Photo: @tan.ervin #LibrairieJousseaume #GalerieVivienne #BookshopsOfTheWorld

Managed to get tickets in the ballot for @haveigotnews, one of @tan.ervin’s favourite shows - only our tickets weren’t guaranteed so we queued for two hours in a heatwave outside @riversidestudioslondon and just about squeaked in before the cutoff. I took along the chonkiest title on my docket, London Orbital, Iain Sinclair’s account of walking around the M25. In the time we spent in the queue I got from Waltham Abbey up to the Heathrow hinterlands. It’s a fascinating look at the rim of London, “this nowhere, this edge”. Multi-storey carparks, a missing City of London gate, the grave of a Saxon king, all out there on the side of the motorway contracting the city’s hammered heart. I don’t envy him having done it. Have I Got News For You (with Clive Myrie hosting and Helen Lewis and Munya Chawawa as guest panellists) was utterly hilarious and I would happily take a doorstopper and queue for it again #LookingLit #TheMotiveAndTheQueue Photo: @tan.ervin Dress: @collectifclothing #LondonOrbital #IainSinclair #HaveIGotNewsForYou

#ohoreads Lady MacBethad by Isabella Schuler, the origin story of the Scottish queen immortalised by Shakespeare as Lady Macbeth. Gruoch, daughter of a displaced prince with druidic ancestry on her Pictish mother’s side, is determined to realise her grandmother’s prophecy that she will be the greatest queen of all. Though she forms an attachment to MacBethad, the son of her father’s friend, she is sent off to be betrothed to Duncan, the heir to the throne of Alba, while MacBethad is dispatched to distant wars. But court intrigue proves its own battlefield, which young Gruoch must use all her wits to survive. Earlier this year I complained about the surfeit of feminist Greek myth retellings. Lady MacBethad provides some source variety (though it’s not as if Gruoch has lacked in fictionalisations - see Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter, for one). While its deep dive into 11th-century Scottish politics and the buried legacy of druidic magic is intriguing, the book lacks a compelling focus in its heroine. Gruoch is engaging as a spirited if precociously articulate child, slowly learning how her world is constrained by the rules set by men; however, after the death of her mother Ailith, who was forced by Christian rule to suppress her druidic heritage, subsequent events are rendered with little emotional resonance. This detachment makes it hard to root for her all-consuming quest for the throne. There’s something gratingly YA about her romance with MacBethad; they’re reduced to lovestruck teenagers at their reunion, even though he’s a hardened warrior and she’s a leader and a mother by that point. The book cuts off at a point where it could have gone on to explore her and MacBethad’s reign, which was actually way longer and more successful than the Shakespeare play would have you believe. It’s an intriguing enough read about a historically misrepresented woman, but a bit of a missed opportunity #LookingLit Thank you to @bloomsburypublishing for the review copy! Photo: @tan.ervin #LadyMacBethad #Macbeth #IsabellaSchuler

#ohoreads Termush by Sven Holm, translated by Sylvia Clayton. "That light streamed out of every object; it shone through robes and skin and the flesh on the bones, the leaves on the trees and the moss on the mountains; it seemed suddenly to reveal the innermost, vulnerable marrow of people and plants, the sensitive growth tissue, the chalk, the iron, the blood." In the wake of nuclear apocalypse, the guests of luxury seaside resort Termush emerge from underground shelters into a world ravaged by radiation. Termush's wealthy residents have paid handsomely to survive in comfort, served by an army of hotel staff, doctors and security men, cocooned by the management from any news too dire. But soon other radiation survivors begin to appear, begging for help, and conflict arises among the guests as to whether the hotel should extend the privileges they have so dearly paid for to these refugees.  Termush is a Danish novella first published in 1967 and brought out in a new edition under the auspices of Jeff VanderMeer (whose recommendation convinced me to pick this up), but it seems eerily not to have aged at all in its portrait of privilege and cataclysm. The dispassionate prose belies the farce of the hotel attempting to keep up appearances when the world has fallen apart, the management organising yacht expeditions to distract the guests from the moans of the sick, the security men hosing down the cacti every morning to get rid of radiation. This gives way to stunning visions of dread, as the invisible changes wrought upon the world and the hotel's inhabitants begin to manifest. It reminded me of the 1961 French film Last Year At Marienbad, which also takes place in an exquisite hotel where something inexplicably troubling has occurred, and of certain dreams I have had, when the sun grew so bright I could not raise my head to see, and we all wound up crawling on the ground. One of the simplest and finest post-apocalyptic works I have read in a while #LookingLit Thanks Viki of @faber_international for this review copy! Photo: @tan.ervin Dress: @beyondretro #Termush #SvenHolm #ApocalypseNow

@librairie_mollat in Bordeaux is truly a never-ending bookstore. I began in the literature section, turned a corner and found myself in Policiers (crime fiction), turned another corner and reached non-fiction, and then it just kept going! Manga! Music! Cookbooks! I don’t think I actually reached the end of it #LookingLit Photo: @tan.ervin #Mollat #BookshopsOfTheWorld

La Librairie de la Rue en Pente, or The Bookshop on the Street that Slopes, because guess where it’s located. I did not anticipate loving Bayonne so much, but its colourful streets, beautiful cathedral and bookshops have gone Bayonne my expectations #LookingLit Photo: @tan.ervin #LibrairieDeLaRueEnPente #BookshopsOfTheWorld

Ascain you shall receive! This is the most remote little library I’ve ever come across, out in the Basque countryside #LookingLit Photo (and pun): @tan.ervin #Ascain #LittleLibrary #BookBox

Follow and Check out 👉 @ohomatopoeia #ohoreads A Bad Girl's Book Of Animals by Wong May By the same token I leave you, I leave myself (with you). The going forth henceforth a grafted green fit to live or die. By the same token I leave you living, dying, or unfit for both, waiting for my return: Your big eyes, short arms that I inherited, failed. - 'Dear Mama' Happy Mother’s Day with Wong May! This is the beautiful new edition of the debut collection of one of Singapore poetry's most elusive figures. It first came out in 1969, making the 25-year-old Wong one of only 20 or so Asians to have had solo-authored books of poetry published in the US. Wong was born in Chongqing, came to Singapore in 1950 with her mother, the late classical Chinese poet Wang Mei Chuang, and now lives in Dublin. After decades in obscurity, she made headlines last year by winning the Windham-Campbell, one of the poetry world's most prestigious prizes. This book, as @hao__guang puts it in a foreword, is a homecoming for a poet whose language has always fundamentally been one of dislocation and exile. The poems are startling and sly, often sharply funny, seasonal in ways you don't expect of seasons, strange. One of my favourites, 'The American Bestseller', opens with "This is me your/ murderer calling from Florida at 3:15/ sorry to wake you/ up". Eggs recur throughout, a motif of fertility and fragility; eggs fall from the shelf; eggs walk away. 'Bastard' repeats the refrain that "the sun is hatching itself". The timespan "5,000 years" keeps coming up; the poems feel tiny, about little things in little rooms, but also ancient, there since the dawn of the written word. The collection is dedicated to “Dear Mama” #LookingLit Thank you to @ethosbooks for this review copy! Photo: @tan.ervin Dress: @collectifclothing

#ohoreads A Bad Girl's Book Of Animals by Wong May By the same token I leave you, I leave myself (with you). The going forth henceforth a grafted green fit to live or die. By the same token I leave you living, dying, or unfit for both, waiting for my return: Your big eyes, short arms that I inherited, failed. - 'Dear Mama' Happy Mother’s Day with Wong May! This is the beautiful new edition of the debut collection of one of Singapore poetry's most elusive figures. It first came out in 1969, making the 25-year-old Wong one of only 20 or so Asians to have had solo-authored books of poetry published in the US. Wong was born in Chongqing, came to Singapore in 1950 with her mother, the late classical Chinese poet Wang Mei Chuang, and now lives in Dublin. After decades in obscurity, she made headlines last year by winning the Windham-Campbell, one of the poetry world's most prestigious prizes. This book, as @hao__guang puts it in a foreword, is a homecoming for a poet whose language has always fundamentally been one of dislocation and exile. The poems are startling and sly, often sharply funny, seasonal in ways you don't expect of seasons, strange. One of my favourites, 'The American Bestseller', opens with "This is me your/ murderer calling from Florida at 3:15/ sorry to wake you/ up". Eggs recur throughout, a motif of fertility and fragility; eggs fall from the shelf; eggs walk away. 'Bastard' repeats the refrain that "the sun is hatching itself". The timespan "5,000 years" keeps coming up; the poems feel tiny, about little things in little rooms, but also ancient, there since the dawn of the written word. The collection is dedicated to “Dear Mama” #LookingLit Thank you to @ethosbooks for this review copy! Photo: @tan.ervin Dress: @collectifclothing #WongMay #ABadGirlsBookOfAnimals #SingLit #MothersDay

Once again, Leila Aboulela didn’t disappoint. I stayed up late just to complete reading this, took two days to recover, and I have absolutely no regrets. This might just be one of my favourites from her. River Spirit is a historical fiction novel set in 19th century Sudan against the tumultuous backdrop of the Mahdist war which was catalysed by the religious movement of Muhammad Ahmad bin Abdullah. This man who claimed to be the Mahdi had started a revolt to establish an Islamic state and went against the Egyptian colonisers who were a part of the larger global imperialism movement. We meet the orphaned slave Akuany aka Zamzam on a quest for freedom, her brother Bol aka Ishaq, Yaseen, a young merchant who saved the siblings, Salha, Yaseen’s wife, Musa, a soldier and staunch follower of the Mahdi, Gordon, the British general, Robert, the Scottish artist. We listen to their stories as they navigate a changing landscape in their homeland and within themselves. I love the weaving of the multiple characters’ perspectives and their polarising views which allows us a look into each character’s unique motivations, their vices, their hopes, their dreams. This story had awoken the history nerd in me and it made me read up more about this fascinating piece of history that I wouldn’t have been acquainted with had I not read this story. As much as this was history, you will notice how many of the issues surfaced are inextricably linked to those we’re still facing today. Colonialism, deceptive theocracy, the role of the matriarch in a society… Leila Aboulela took a significant point in Sudan’s history and delved deep, exploring characters that invites us to listen to their stories with empathy. River Spirit is an intricate, poetic, page-turning masterpiece. An absolute must read. // River Spirit by Leila Aboulela. 5/5 💫📚☕️ #thebookjacket #bookreviews #historicalfiction #lookbookliterally #booksasoutfits #lookinglit

Last month, @esplanadesingapore invited me to write an essay for their Offstage platform about pocket cities in Singapore’s speculative fiction, inspired by @itsneonyang’s short story Pocket Cities. It’s been such a delight to work on something that’s both so close to my own research interests and a phenomenon I was privileged to watch unfurl at close hand during my six years as a books reporter. Link in bio to the essay, and also check out the cool interactives of the little red comma project #LookingLit #SingLit Thank you to @clareoon and the Esplanade for this opportunity; to @ethosbooks, Mark Wee, @theartshouse and @checkpointtheatre for supplying visuals; and to the authors whose works I reference, including @yishkabob, @judtheobscure, @nuraliahnorasid, midoricomplex, @yammonation, @luhuiyi, @myleyantay and @vrocampo. Batik dress courtesy of @c_topia. I also dug up some old #bookstagram shots of books featured in the piece, which has been a real trip down memory lane. I remember when I used to crop the top part of my face out. That saved me so much trouble with eye makeup.

Being happy is always in style. #behumble #blessed #chillin #lookinglit

It’s incredible that bookstores in Spain are so prevalent that you can go to Ronda, a city up in the mountains 750m above sea level chiefly known for its very nice bridge, and there will still be a roadside stall selling books #LookingLit #BookshopsOfTheWorld Photo: @tan.ervin Dress: @collectifclothing

Un Gato en Bicicleta (A Cat on a Bicycle) in Seville has to have the best bookstore name ever. It’s got indie books, it’s got very cool art (that snail woman is a vibe), it’s got coffee and fresh orange juice. It doesn’t have a cat, but we did meet a very sweet dog #LookingLit Photo: @tan.ervin #UnGatoEnBicicleta #BookshopsOfTheWorld

Chilling with some Federico García Lorca in the gorgeous @librerialamistral. La Mistral, named after the Chilean Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral, was opened mid-pandemic by three Argentinian friends. There is a lovely bookshop dog called Aurora. Pedro Almodóvar was recently in the shop for the launch of his book El Último Sueño! We missed him by a few days #LookingLit Photo: @tan.ervin #LibreríaLaMistral #BookshopsOfTheWorld

Onward with the Spanish bookshop tour! Now we’ve reached Madrid, where the streets are literally lined with books. In an alleyway near a church and chocolateria is used bookshop Librería San Ginés, said to have opened in the 19th century, where shelves of antique tomes and cheap paperbacks spill onto the street #LookingLit Photo: @tan.ervin #LibreriaSanGines #BookshopsOfTheWorld

😎The difference is… daylight! 😎 We understand the difference GOOD light makes to your work. Don’t let your machine’s factory fitted lights or halogens let you down - we've got you! 📸Cracking shot from Charlie Smyth sent to us a couple of weeks ago who upgraded his bonnet headlights with our UTV372K. See the difference from halogen to LED 👀 #LEDLights #lookingLIT #UTVProducts #halogenvsLED #headlightupgrade

Today is Día del Libro, or World Book Day, in Spain! It is the death anniversary of William Shakespeare and the day Miguel de Cervantes was buried (he’d died the day before in 1616). Here’s a splendid swirl of pages I serendipitously glimpsed in a store window while wandering the mediaeval quarter of Burgos - Librería Luz y Vida opened in 1948 and has had three generations of booksellers #LookingLit Photo: @tan.ervin #LibreriaLuzyVida #BookshopsOfTheWorld #WorldBookDay #DiadelLibro

On a brief cross-border trip to the French seaside town of Biarritz, I chanced upon this bookstore called Librairie Bookstore - since “librairie” is “bookstore” in French, that means it’s literally “Bookstore Bookstore”. It packs a lot into a tiny two-storey space, helped by its mirrored ceilings. There are these old-fashioned bureaus which function as little booths for the booksellers. The one on the mezzanine level is suspended in mid-air, adorned with a picture of Marlene Dietrich and a plate that reads “Place de la Contrescarpe”. A lovely little bookshop for a postcard-perfect town #LookingLit #LibrairieBookstore #BookstoreBiarritz #BookshopsOfTheWorld

NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH STATE OF EMERGENCY! Surprised but delighted to spot a Spanish translation of @jeremy_tiang’s State Of Emergency by @amok.ediciones in @altairllibreria, which like @dauntbooks in London arranges its sections according to which parts of the world the books come from #LookingLit Photo: @tan.ervin #JeremyTiang #StateOfEmergency #SingLit #AltairLlibreria #barcelona #BookshopsOfTheWorld

💥Mix and Match⚡️ Here our customer has used a mixture of work lights to really illuminate the area he needed the most light. Both still pump out an impressive brightness but the difference in power can help you personalise your working environment at night. 📸 Thanks to Jack Roebuck for sending us this picture of his digger... looking LIT! #LEDdiggerlights #LEDlightsfordiggers #LEDlights #UTVProducts #lookingLIT