時代精神書屋

Winner of the PEN Translates award

From 1976 to 1989, Hai Fan was part of the guerrilla forces of the Malayan Communist Party. These short stories are inspired by his experiences during his thirteen years in the rainforest.

Struggling through an arduous trek, two comrades pine for each other but don't know how to declare their love; a woman who has annoyed all her comrades finally wins their approval when she finds a mythical mousedeer; improvising around the lack of ingredients, a perpetually hungry guerrilla makes delicious cakes from cassava and elephant fat. The rainforest may be a dangerous place where death awaits, but so do love, desire and hope.

Delicious Hunger is a book about the moments in and between warfare, when hunger is so palpable it can be tasted, and the natural world becomes an extension of the body. Deftly translated by Jeremy Tiang, Hai Fan's stories are about a group of people who chose to fight for a better world and, in the process, built their own.

Winner of Best Fiction Title for Singapore Book Awards (2016)
Winner of the Singapore Literature Prize for Fiction (2014)
Selected by The Business Times as a Top 10 Singapore book from (1965–2015)
Shortlisted for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s Internationaler Literaturpreis
Shortlisted for the Frankfurt Book Fair’s LiBeraturpreis
Longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award (2014)

Meet an over-the-hill pop yé-yé singer with a faulty heart; two conservative middle- aged women holding hands in the Galápagos, and the proprietor of a Laundromat with a penchant for Cantonese songs of heartbreak. Find out the truth about racial riot fodder-girl Maria Hertogh, now living out her days as a chambermaid in Lake Tahoe; a mirage of the Merlion as a ladyboy working Orchard Towers; and a high- stakes fantasy starring the still-suave lead of the 1990s TV hit serial, The Unbeatables.

Ministry of Moral Panic is an extraordinary collection and the introduction of a revelatory new voice. Heartfelt and sexy, the stories of Amanda Lee Koe encompass a skewed world fraught with prestige anxiety, moral relativism, sexual frankness, and the improbable necessity of human connection. Told in strikingly original prose, these are stories that plough the possibilities of understanding Singapore and her denizens.

G*D IS A WOMAN

In Singapore, there is only one rule: be careful who you troll. Frustrated by the rigid, unforgiving system in which they try to make art, a bunch of irate artists start a fake petition to cancel Ariana Grande. Things get wildly out of hand when some Singaporeans take the petition so seriously that Ari’s upcoming concert comes under threat. 

In a whirlwind of competing petitions, frantic Zoom calls between Los Angeles and Singapore, and whispered conversations at the golf course, the campaign to save the concert comes up against the most powerful people in Singapore: the easily offended. 

From acclaimed playwright Joel Tan (Tartuffe: The Imposter, The Butterfly Lovers) comes G*d Is A Woman – a scathing satire on censorship, complaint culture, and the ridiculous outbursts of moral outrage that frequently reverberate across the Singaporean internet. Directed with gleeful irreverence by Ivan Heng, this audaciously funny new play will make you laugh until it hurts.

TARTUFFE: THE IMPOSTER

A wealthy family starts to unravel when the head of the household, Orgon, befriends Tartuffe — a charming, seductive con artist masquerading as a man of faith. Everyone else smells a rat, even as Tartuffe weasels his way into Orgon’s home, heart and bank account. What will it take for Orgon to finally see the light? Can unholy disaster be averted? Or will blind devotion win the day?

In celebration of the 400th anniversary of Molière’s birth, Wild Rice’s Tartuffe: The Imposter remains trenchantly relevant today, in a world populated by scam artists and false prophets. With an incisive new script by Joel Tan and direction by Glen Goei, this is a classic satire on religious hypocrisy and a warning about the calamity that can follow when we turn a blind eye to the dark deeds of the “pious”. Desperately trying to untangle vice from virtue is a stellar ensemble cast led by Ivan Heng and Benjamin Chow.

In Singapore, a loudly ‘pro-family’ society, why is work-life balance so elusive? And why are parents so uneasy? What accounts for this gap between the lived reality and ideal narrative of Singapore families?

Sociologist and bestselling author Teo You Yenn turns her eyes to the contours and rhythms of life inside families, exploring how ‘kiasu’ parents are made and investigating the ways in which inequality marks life in contemporary Singapore. Drawing from in-depth interviews with parents from all walks of life, Unease examines how social structures, individual strategies and common practices come to produce Singaporean ‘cultures’ of doing family.

An incisive exposé of how the logics of hierarchy, competition and unequal worth infect ordinary people’s lives, Unease asks what these cost parents, children and the values we hold as a society. And what possibilities are there for living differently?

We Saw Mountains gathers nine stories of human and non-human daring, where quotidian life is cracked open to possibilities of autonomy and re-imagination. A teen’s part-time job tests his integrity, a grieving elephant finds a new home by way of a contested river, and on an island a mountain appears, fully formed.

Through these visionary tales, Diana Rahim—whose stories have been featured in Best New Singaporean Short Stories and The Best of World SF—asks, can we do things differently? Can we imagine a different kind of life?

Step into this spellbinding collection and witness transformations both cosmic and everyday. Journey from the desert to the oasis, from drought to bloom, and return to our world with a rekindled faith in the possibility of becoming.