新文潮出版社

內容簡介

　　故事發生在八十年代末的香港。主角秦菲立是澳洲華裔，是電機工程的博士，應了香港的著名學府香江理工學院的禮聘，去當該院電機工程系的系主任。菲立此人詭計多端、城府深邃、心胸狹窄、睚眥必報；同時亦好色如命、嗜酒如狂。故事從他從澳洲搭飛機抵達香港開始，看他如何一步步攻心計、耍手段實現其龐大的野心；也看他如何發揮他的風流本色，跟形形色色的女性纏綿。到底最後他能否雄霸職場、笑傲情場？

作者簡介

　　林中子，新加坡華校生，理工學院建築系畢業。在公共與私人機構工作不到十年，其間半工讀進修學士及碩士學位後，回母校工院當了二十幾年講師。林因對辯論有興趣，便負責訓練辯論員參加電視台的華語大專辯論會。閒暇時候也有筆耕，寫寫小說，自娛自樂。偶爾也發表文章在《聯合早報》。

About This Is How We Come Back

One of a pair of lovers slices off his nipple on a dare. Both argue about enlightenment before it becomes too late, after retreating from the hostile world into a cave of wildly carnal fulfilment. Marrying mystical exploration and avant-garde homo-erotica, here is a prose-poem-as-fairy-tale in the modern day about the things few of us in love may see, insights about love and loss which pierce the amnesia of ordinary time.

About Cyril Wong

Cyril Wong is a poet whose works “embrace themes of love, alienation and human relationships of all kinds” (TIME magazine, 28 Nov. 2007). His books include Beachlight (Seagull Books, 2023) and This Side of Heaven (Epigram Books, 2020). A two-time recipient of the Singapore Literature Prize (2006 and 2016) and the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award for Literature (2005), he completed his doctoral degree in English Literature at the National University of Singapore in 2012. His work was featured in Poems on the Underground in London (2022). His writings have appeared in journals like Poetry International, Poetry New Zealand, Ambit, Atlanta Review, as well as in anthologies by W. W. Norton and Everyman’s Library.

About Rosetta Cultures

Rosetta Cultures is an imprint by TrendLit Publishing that focuses on championing and bridging languages and the arts across cultures and communities.

Rosetta Cultures is currently based in Singapore, serving local and international readers.

Publication Information

ISBN: 978-981-18-8274-6 (Paperback)
CIP: Available with National Libarary Board, Singapore
Publisher / Imprint: Rosetta Cultures
Date of Publication: December 2024
Suggested Categorization: Poetry, Contemporary Literature, Singapore Literature
Format: 19cm (H) x 13cm (W), 68 pages

About Aerial Roots

Aerial Roots is a poetry collection that meditates on the liminal space of displacement and settlement, arrivals and departures, uprootedness, and assimilation. It is between these hybrid shifts of time and place, of bilocation, that diasporic writers dwell for most of their lives. 

Visualising the ongoing narratives as akin to the banyan tree and its allegorical roots, the poems revisit the vast canvas of memory, places, and lived experiences. This collection negotiates and interrogates the complex issues of identity, ethnicity, belonging, heritage, and multiple homes to know where and what home is. 

About Shilpa Dikshit Thapliyal

Shilpa Dikshit Thapliyal is an Indian-Singaporean poet and author of two poetry collections. Her work has appeared in the Practice Research & Tangential Activities (PR&TA) Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, The Best Asian Poetry, The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, Trivium, Little Things, to let the light in, Anima Methodi, and elsewhere. 

Poems from her previous collection Between Sips of Masala Chai (Kitaab International, 2019) have been selected for secondary school curriculum in Singapore. Her poem, ‘Hymn of Hope’, written during the pandemic for the Homeward project, was performed by the Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic Orchestra. Some of her poems have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, and Chinese Ink-Art. 

Her poems have been nominated for the Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize and awarded second place in The Letter Review Prize, 2022. Her third collection, Aerial Roots, was awarded The Letter Review Prize for Unpublished Books, 2024. She has read poetry at the Singapore Writers Festival, the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Mumbai, Poetry on the Move, Canberra, The RevTen Radio, USA, and the Festival of Friendship (Revolution of Tenderness, USA).

Shilpa has adjudicated several poetry competitions including the National Poetry Competition, the CLASS Poetry Competition, the National Poetry Recitation Competition, and the Write and Burn Spoken Word Competition. Shilpa serves on the organising committee of Poetry Festival Singapore as a poet and literary organiser.

Born and raised in India, Shilpa completed her Master's in Computer Management (MCM) from Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Symbiosis University, Pune. She worked in a leading IT services company before relocating to Singapore in 2001. She has recently completed her second Master's, M.A. (Arts) from the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Shilpa resides in Singapore with her family.
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Recommendations/Blurbs

These poems take us to the minutiae of the author’s beloved landscapes, familiar haunts and remembered neighbourhoods, but a new, rich tapestry of sights and sounds; of ethnic variety and riches. This is food for the soul; part of a significant journey of discovery, recall and recovery, a traveller’s recognition of how nature’s beneficence is a palpable blessing no matter where one is in the world.

 — Anne Lee Tzu Pheng

Tender. Present. Generous. Dignified. Shilpa Dikshit Thapliyal’s Aerial Roots is a deeply contemplative collection, intelligent and lustrous in its surfacing of rich feeling and authenticity. Perambulating around the banyan tree are poems laced in heavy symbolism. Threaded through are astonishingly beautiful images and sounds. The confessional moments meander their way confidently through verse, from the ghazal and haibun to prose poem. One becomes witness to a fondness—of memory, of nostalgia. Wait for the beautiful epiphanies, even as time and space remain suspended in this alluring lyric imagination. One encounters a poetry that bravely looks at ideas of identity, border crossings, diaspora, heritage, tradition, community, family, and what it means to belong. Indeed, this is a welcome homecoming for the author, and what a grand tour of a life’s journeying it has been. Sublime. Remarkable. Simply magnificent.

— Desmond Francis Xavier Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé
Winner of the Singapore Literature Prize

Shilpa's poetry traces how shifting light, from "coppered dawn" to "a sundown mist [descending] on the ghats," illuminates the tender narrative of a family in transition. The play between natural radiance and urban gleam becomes an objective correlative for the immigrant clan's own metamorphosis. Each poem distills the complex emotions of leaving and arriving, of roots seeking new soil while branches reach toward changed skies.

—Eric Tinsay Valles, poet, editor and educator

Shilpa's is a voice that is at once intelligent and humane. Her work is dynamic and beautifully paced—a culturally rich and sensually stimulating experience that is, quite simply, a joy to read.

— Kita Das, Ol James
The Letter Review

Shilpa has beautifully meshed the world she grew up in and with the world she currently calls home. She draws parallels between her childhood by recalling memories of Little India and her Amma, and finds joy in how technology keeps the family together internationally. This collection of poems invites the reader into her world of duality, through her thoughtfully crafted words.

— Latha
Writer

Through richly evocative language and a keen eye for botanical metaphors, Shilpa embarks on a poignant exploration of movement and displacement, love and belonging, and the liminal spaces between migration and settlement. Buttressed by her transnational sensibilities, the personal and the universal entwine in her poetry, serving as a living, breathing testament to the intricate connections between place, identity, and the human experience. Like seeds that grow into mighty banyan trees, Shilpa's poems weave a tapestry of interwoven perspectives, akin to a reticulated network of aerial roots—one which branches out into a forest of reflection and imagination that takes root in the reader's mind.

— Ow Yeong Wai Kit
Educator and Poet  

These poems are lush with images and symbols from the two countries/cultures Shilpa deftly inhabits, her original home in India and the new in Singapore where she now lives. The diction reflects this reality,  the English enriched with untranslatable words from the mother country and allusions ( people, places, birds, trees etc), pointing to a restless, assimilative mind journeying to seek identities, roots, and loops in her rich past and present.
 
A cornucopia of poetry.

— Robert Yeo
 Poet and Playwright

Aerial Roots is a heartfelt homage to memories of the poet’s time spent in India, her country of origin. Set under the metaphoric, awning leitmotif of the banyan tree, Thapliyal’s poems offer the reader a universe with hidden windows that open unto an “undergrowth of decades”. One unlocks new meanings every time one enters her work. The poems speak of dislocation, migration, identity or the loss of it, and of the untethered state of our being, while also being contained within exquisite, precise language. The poet has a remarkable ability to draw connections between the personal and the cosmic, the present and the past, longing and reality. Her work is tender, incisive, clear-sighted and deeply intimate, replete with “stains and spills of plump memories”. Her poetry stuns us, wounds us, keeps us warm, while being unapologetically her own. The poems display amazing manoeuvring of the terrain of the page and the mind - a gentle flow, akin to a river’s graceful swirl on its journey. The memories shared with us are mesmerising and quintessentially, culturally, charmingly Indian. Indeed her poems hold “… lamps to moonless skies”. The collection is a milestone written on the existential nuances of life. Every line, an “aperture for departure”.

— Vinita Agrawal
Poet and Editor
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About Rosetta Cultures

Rosetta Cultures is an imprint by TrendLit Publishing that focuses on championing and bridging languages and the arts across cultures and communities.

Rosetta Cultures is currently based in Singapore, serving local and international readers.

Publication Information

ISBN: 978-981-94-3584-5 (Paperback)
CIP: Available with National Libarary Board, Singapore
Publisher / Imprint: Rosetta Cultures
Date of Publication: August 2025
Suggested Categorization: Poetry, Contemporary Literature, Singapore Literature
Format: 19cm (H) x 13cm (W), 100 pages

About the Book

Eros doesn’t believe in love—despite being named after the god of it. All he wants is the lead role in The Enchanted Stream. But when Zach, a maddening stranger, wrecks his audition, Eros swears he’ll never forgive him. Then fate hands him a second chance… and Zach as his rehearsal partner.

Now, every line they rehearse blurs into something dangerous—something that feels nothing like hate. Is it just stage chemistry, or has Eros finally met his match in more ways than one?

About the Author

M. Allen, also known as xPANICx in the Philippines and on Wattpad, is a corporate guy by day and a dreamer by night. He started writing back in 6th grade, and despite his busy schedule and laziness, still continues to do so in his spare time. His book The Bathroom Love Affair was originally published in Filipino by Summit Books’ imprint Pop Fiction.

About Giraffe Media (Singapore)

Giraffe Media (GM), an imprint of TrendLit Publishing Private Limited based in Singapore, shares stories that celebrate love in all its forms. Like a giraffe reaching gracefully toward the sky, we believe love can be tall, gentle, and enduring. Our books invite readers to wander through tender moments, cherish heartfelt connections, and bask in the magic, warmth, and freedom of loving openly and fully.

Publication Information

ISBN: 978-981-94-3814-3 (Paperback)
Publisher / Imprint: Giraffe Media
Date of Publication: September 2025
Suggested Categorization: Fiction, Boys' Love (BL), Contemporary Literature
Format: 19cm (H) x 13cm (W), 248 pages

About the Book

Noah’s life takes a wild turn when Adam—his supposed boyfriend from the future—shows up out of nowhere. The grumpy and reckless Adam does not know that they are a thing and hates him for his guts, giving Noah an uphill task of winning him over.

Worse, Adam can’t control his unstable time-travel powers, putting himself in danger at every turn. But Noah has seen the Adam beneath the chaos in the future versions of him—the one who will someday love him—and he’s determined to protect him until that future finally comes true.

About the Author

Jom Gamerland is actually the author’s pen name and is an anagram of his real name. He has been writing in Wattpad since 2021. Jom has completed multiple novels and Ark and Apple is one of his proudest works. He had won multiple prompts and official Wattpad contests until he decided to take it slow as he pursues his Nursing career in the Unites States of America.

He was born in a community where discrimination against homosexuality is rampant. He has witnessed how many people impose their own beliefs in the happiness of others. The urge to break this stigma prompted him to write his own story and help readers learn that true love should be seen from a spectrum.

About Giraffe Media (Singapore)

Giraffe Media (GM), an imprint of TrendLit Publishing Private Limited based in Singapore, shares stories that celebrate love in all its forms. Like a giraffe reaching gracefully toward the sky, we believe love can be tall, gentle, and enduring. Our books invite readers to wander through tender moments, cherish heartfelt connections, and bask in the magic, warmth, and freedom of loving openly and fully.

Publication Information

ISBN: 978-981-94-3815-0 (Paperback)
Publisher / Imprint: Giraffe Media
Date of Publication: September 2025
Suggested Categorization: Fiction, Boys' Love (BL), Contemporary Literature
Format: 19cm (H) x 13cm (W), 248 pages