Backlist books: King Rat by James Clavell

Backlist books is a column by Lucy Day Werts that focuses on enduring, important works from or about Asia.

This post is about King Rat, a semi-autobiographical novel set in Singapore’s Changi prison camp during the final days of World War II. In the novel, a young Brit (a character who represents the author) is befriended by an enterprising American who has amassed a surprising amount of power via surreptitious trading within the Japanese-held POW camp.

This debut novel, treating a variety of themes more or less closely related to wartime ethics, was an immediate bestseller when published in 1962. King Rat and other successful novels in Clavell’s Asian Saga (including, famously, Shogun) have been adapted into television miniseries.

See below to find out what you need to know to decide whether you should read King Rat, or what you should know about it even if you never do!

Expat living / Stephanie Suga Chen

Trailing spouse is the dismissive name given to the non-working wives, and sometimes these days the house husbands, who trail along to expat postings in their partners' high-flying wakes.

Stephanie Suga Chen, a former investment banker and partner of a New York City-based private investment fund, moved to Singapore in 2012 with her husband, two children and elderly cocker spaniel. She is the author of a newly-released fictionalized memoir, Travails of a Trailing Spouse, in which she unveils the thrills, craziness, and frustrations, of being a trailing spouse.

Here Stephanie discusses her debut novel, and briefly reviews three other books about expat life in Asia.

Singapore Saga / John D. Greenwood

John D. Greenwood is a Scot now transplanted to New York, who began his career teaching philosophy, including a stint at the National University of Singapore (NUS), but who has since become an historian of psychology. He recently re-visited Singapore to promote Forbidden Hill, volume 1 of a projected six-part series, Singapore Saga, which will, when complete, offer a fictionalised overview of the first hundred years of modern Singapore's existence, from its founding by Raffles in 1819, to the aftermath of World War One, in 1919. I met John at NUS to talk about his ambitious undertaking. 

Forbidden Hill covers 1819, to the mid 1830s. It features multiple plotlines rooted in historical events, and multiple characters - European, Chinese, Indian and Malay. Many of John's characters - Raffles, Farquhar - are based on real people, although others are completely made-up.

Lion City lit: Lancing Girls of a Happy World

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore. Our regular column Lion City lit explores in-depth what’s going on in the City-State, lit-wise.

Local publishing house Ethos Books has just launched Lancing Girls of a Happy World by Adeline Foo

Lancing is a Singaporean pronunciation of dancing, and the book is an account of the cabaret girls of yesteryear. In the late 1930s, the first wave of Shanghainese glamour girls arrived to join the cabarets in Singapore. Another wave came following the Communist Revolution of 1949. These Chinese migrants influenced local women to join the cabaret as professional dancers, too.

Contemporary voices: State of Emergency by Jeremy Tiang

In her regular column Contemporary voices Elaine Chiew explores books and authors making waves around Asia, and beyond. Here she discusses State of Emergency, by Jeremy Tiang, from Singapore.

Henry James apparently said, “It takes a lot of history to produce a little literature.”  One might find this proven true in Jeremy Tiang’s debut novel, State of Emergency, which cuts across swaths of history starting from the Batang Kali massacre in Malaya by Scots Guards in 1948, wending through key episodes of Communist suppression in Singapore, such as the Hock Lee Bus Riots (1955), Operation Coldstore (1967) and Operation Spectrum (1983), the detention of a Catholic priest and various church members in 1987, fetching up to current day Singapore (the MRT system that’s like “something out of science fiction” and Tiong Bahru likened to Hoxton, London.)

StoryDrive Asia

The Singapore Book Publishers Association and Frankfurt Book Fair are jointly organising the 2017 StoryDrive Asia conference on 13-14 November, at the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore.

The two-day conference is aimed at authors - published and unpublished - publishers, marketing managers, editors, rights and license managers, and service providers. It will cover topics such as copyright and licensing, e-production, sales, new marketing strategies and trends, international business, new technologies, future ways of storytelling like virtual reality and augmented reality, and cross-media sales.

Lion City Lit: Writing and talking about race in Singapore by Eldes Tran

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore, a multi-racial city. The majority population is of Chinese descent.  There are also large minorities of people of Malay or Indian descent, and of Eurasians. Our regular column Lion City Lit explores in-depth what’s going on in the City-State, lit-wise. Here Eldes Tran reports on a forum about racial discourse in Singaporean literature hosted last Thursday, July 27, at the National Library, by Epigram Books, a local independent publisher of Singaporean stories for all ages. Eldes is an assistant editor at Epigram Books.

Q & A: Ovidia Yu

Ovidia Yu was born in, lives in and writes about Singapore. After a happy childhood spent reading, drawing comics and dramatizing stories, she dropped out of medical school to become a writer. She achieved international success with a trio of Aunty Lee Mysteries: Aunty Lee’s Delights; Aunty Lee’s Deadly Specials; Aunty Lee’s Chilled Revenge. Her latest novel, The Frangipani Tree Mystery, takes her crime writing in a new direction.

The novel is set in 1930s colonial Singapore. Ovidia says she chose to write about her grandparents’ Singapore because it was where and when most of the stories she and her friends heard as children were set. The Frangipani Tree Mystery introduces amateur sleuth Chen Su Lin, a local Chinese-Singaporean with a limp.  She is hired by Acting Governor Palin to look after his youngest daughter.  Whilst working for the Palins, it falls to Su Lin to help ace-detective Chief Inspector Le Froy uncover the cause of a mysterious death….

Singapore: Unlikely Power by John Curtis Perry

John Curtis Perry is the Henry Willard Denison Professor of History at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He has also served as the director of Tufts’ Maritime Studies program and was the founding president of its Institute for Global Maritime Studies. He has written widely on Asia-US relations, particularly on relations between American and Japan. In 1991, the Japanese government awarded him the Imperial decoration of the Order of the Sacred Treasure for his contributions to US-Japan relations.

Perry's latest book Singapore: Unlikely Power, explores the implausibility of Singapore's success. It tracks the meteoric rise of Singapore to the status of first-world dynamo in just three decades, shows how the city-state’s founders adopted a resolutely pragmatic approach to economic development rather than following any one fashionable ideology, and offers an overview of a country that has perfected one of the world's most influential political-economic models, despite its tiny size.

In this guest post, John Curtis Perry considers whether Singapore can offer a model to other countries.

My working day by Eldes Tran

My working day is an occasional series in which publishing professionals talk about their jobs.

Eldes Tran is an assistant editor at Epigram Books, Singapore’s largest independent publisher of local stories for all ages. She mostly edits nonfiction manuscripts, but also some children’s books. Apart from editing, she also acts as a project manager seeing a book through all stages, including making sure the right illustrator is picked, the layout is balanced, and deadlines are met.

Epigram Books is Eldes’ first foray into book publishing, but she has been an editor for 11 years in the US and Asia. She started at newspapers Newsday and the Los Angeles Times, and later spent six years in Hong Kong with the South China Morning Post and New York Times.

So, over to Eldes...

Lion City Lit notes: update to William Farquhar and Singapore book launch

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore – the Lion City. Lucía Damacela keeps an eye on local listings. 

The book William Farquhar and Singapore, by Nadia H. Wright, which will be launched in Penang, as we announced in a previous note, is also being launched in Singapore. Here are the details:

Date: May 30, 2017
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Place: The Salon, National Museum of Singapore, 93 Stamford Road, Singapore 178897
Transport: Bras Basah and Dhobi Ghaut MRT.
Price: Free admission - RSVP at admin@entrepotpublishing.com.

Opening address by Professor Tommy Koh, National University of Singapore. Talk by the author, Nadia H. Wright. Official launch by Scott Wightman, British High Commissioner to Singapore.

This weekend: literary events in Singapore

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore – the Lion City. Lucía Damacela keeps an eye on local listings. A sample of literary events taking place in Singapore this weekend

Migrant Poetic Tales

Saturday, 20 May 2017
5pm to 6pm
Booktique
CityLink Mall, #B1-17A, 1 Raffles Link, Singapore 039393
Free Admission (tickets through Peatix)

A dialogue between Singapore poets, migrant workers and the community at large, this event features migrant writers from Bangladesh, The Philippines, India-Tamil, Indonesia and Singapore. The event is co-organized by Amrakajona Zakir, a two-time winner of the Migrant Poetry Competition.

Asian Festival of Children’s Content

The Asian Festival of Children’s Content (AFCC) is held annually in Singapore. This year it takes place next week, from Wednesday May 17, to Sunday May 21. The Festival, organised by the National Book Development Council of Singapore, aims to strengthen the creation and promotion of children’s books and other content, with an emphasis on Asia. Lucía Damacela reports.

More than one hundred local and international authors, illustrators, editors, and other professionals from the publishing industry will participate in this year’s AFCC. Countries represented include Australia, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Thailand, the United States and the United Kingdom.

This year, the country of focus is Indonesia. The Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organisation (SEAMEO) is a regional intergovernmental body promoting cooperation through education, science, and culture. It operates a regional centre for quality improvement of teachers and education personnel in Jakarta, where  Dr. Felicia Utorodewo is the director in language. She will be speaking at AFCC, as will Dr. Murti Bunanta, children’s literature specialist and president of the Indonesia section of the International Board on Books for Young People. Mr. Wandi S. Brata, CEO of Indonesia’s Gramedia Publishing, will also attend, along with a team from Indonesia’s Society for the Advancement of Children’s Literature.

Lion City lit listing: Art Book Fair at Gillman Barracks

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore – the Lion City.  Lucía Damacela keeps an eye on local listings.

What: An annual event, the Singapore Art Book Fair (SABF) showcases contemporary art books & magazines.

Lion City Lit: OF ZOOS

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore. Our regular column Lion City Lit explores in-depth what’s going on in the City-State, lit-wise. Here Lucía Damacela continues her occasional series highlighting Singapore online literary magazines, by talking to New York-based Kimberley Lim and Singapore-based Hao Guang, respectively the founding editor and the co-editor of OF ZOOS, an annual, theme-based, online magazine publishing poetry and poetically sensible art by Singaporeans for Singaporeans, and for everyone else. It published its first issue in April 2012.  

Lion City lit notes: Singaporean writers shortlisted for international short story prize

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore. Our regular column Lion City Lit explores in-depth what’s going on in the City-State, lit-wise. Lion City lit notes provide quick updates between columns. By Lucia Damacela

Lion City lit notes / SingPoWriMo starts tomorrow

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore. Our regular column Lion City Lit explores in-depth what’s going on in the City-State, lit-wise. Lion City lit notes provide quick updates between columns. By Lucia Damacela

William L. Gibson on trilogies

William L. Gibson is the author of Singapore Black, Singapore Yellow and Singapore Red, which together form the Detective Hawksworth Trilogy, hardboiled historical thrillers set in late 19^th Century Malaya and Singapore. Gibson says he always wanted to write a trilogy, and he here explains why he decided the three-novel format “would be the best way to tell the story I wanted to tell.”

Lion City Lit: The Eloquent Orifice by Lucía Damacela

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore. Lion City Lit explores in-depth what’s going on in the City-State, lit-wise.  In Lucía Damacela’s fourth installment of her series about Singapore online literary magazines, her focus is on The Eloquent Orifice.

Founded in 2013 by a group of creative professionals, including the current Editor-in-Chief Crispin Rodrigues and Creative Director Geraldine Tan, The Eloquent Orifice (EO) is an online academic literary journal created to bring the arts “within reach of those who believe in the power of critical thought, active discussion and passionate creation in the shaping of contemporary society.”

EO is always open for submissions of original literary pieces, articles and art works. Published twice a year, one issue is out at the beginning and one at the end of the year. Their sixth and seventh issues combined are soon to be released.

Geraldine Tan, an editor and writer currently doing post-graduate studies in Melbourne, and Crispin Rodrigues, and educator, writers and editor, responded to questions about the magazine’s history, purpose and functioning.

Indie spotlight: Tabby Stirling

Indie Spotlight is Siobhan Daiko’s monthly column on self-publishing. This month Siobhan offers a platform to indie author Tabby Stirling.

Tabby now lives in Scotland with her husband, two children and a beagle, but she was previously an expat in Singapore. She has had several flash and short stories published in Spelk fiction, Camroc Fiction Press, Literary Orphans, Mslexia and others.

Tabby recently signed with Unbound, a UK-based literary crowdfunding publisher, for her novel Blood on the Banana Leaf. This shines a light on the maid abuse that came to her attention whilst she was living in Singapore. It explores how women cope in the most demeaning of circumstances.

Over to Tabby…