Babette's Feast

Series · 12

books · 2011-2023

By Alvin Pang, Carol Chan, Jason Erik Lundberg, and more

Books in series

You Cannot Count Smoke

2011

These little poems are my orphaned children, with no book or anthology to call their home (until now) due to their mysterious, even surrealist, qualities that have begun to occupy my writing in a gradual but certain way. The ambivalences of love, depression, mortality—you will find all of these themes here, all grounded in a perspective that remains, I hope, fiercely introspective and personal. ~ Cyril Wong

What Gives Us Our Names

2022

He’d gotten the idea from a book, not unlike the one you last read and loved, whose lurid covers you have already forgotten. For a canvas, he used not his own skin but his very life, spending his days as if he were made up of the most telling bits of other people. To do this, he learned to watch quietly and look deeply, past the busy surfaces until he could discern the colours beneath, the ones that did not change. One by one he would name them as he wove them into his heart in the deep of night. He touched you once, borrowing pieces of your story in passing. They are here still, in case you wish to look.

The Law of Second Marriages

2011

If I had to do it all over again, I would lie to my father. I think he wanted me to lie to him too, but I hadn’t quite perfected the art of lying yet. I’ve been trying to make up for it ever since. The best liars always tell a mixture of truth and lies, and the very best believe their own lies in the end. ~ Christine Chia

The World Must Weigh The Same

2023

Here is a brief case of references. I imagine a man observe his daughter observe as he goes about the business of living. In attempting to give this life some significance, perhaps what emerges are questions regarding my own, which is not so much a story as a case of matters regarding facts. ~ Carol Chan

Careless

2011

Life has its own amazing ways to pull us into caring too much. Try to care a little less—take a step back. Then take things into our stride. Begin to feel that life caresses us back rather than harasses : That's my experience. It can be yours too. ~ Jacqueline Ong

I'm Still Here

2023

What is a photograph ? Is it art, truth or a fragment of a long-gone memory ? Is it more reliable than a distant recollection, or just as fragile ? No matter the definition, certain photographs have shed their light on certain points of my life; and I hope the same for you. ~ Belinda Wan

#11

The Billion Shop

2012

The Billion Shop was a shop near my office that sold paper money and other artefacts for ethnic Chinese people to burn as offerings to their dead. It no longer exists: Jixiang Traditional Foot Massage now stands in its place. I'm not one to lament change, and trust in Adam Smith's invisible hand that the good people of Toa Payoh would rather please souls. But I'm also sentimental: about places gone, loves lost, ideals overturned or, more often, outgrown. Consider these stories, then, as my own paper offerings to my dead.

#12

A Place On Earth

2012

The world has never been smaller or easier to navigate. It has never been more complicated or rapidly changing. In this context, a sense of belonging, a sense of identity, the need for a place to stand, continue to be both important and elusive. Time and distance become more variable qualities but the threads of longing and belonging remain strong. It is these threads that bind the poems in 'a place on earth'.

#15

The Pillow Book

2012

Inspired by the example of eleventh-century Japanese author and court lady Sei Shōnagon, Jee Leong Koh collects his miscellaneous jottings in his own pillow book. Written in the genre called zuihitsu, which compromises both prose and poetry, these observations, lists and anedotes on life in Singapore and New York are, in turn, humorous, reflective, satirical, nostalgic and outrageous. They were penned for the author's own amusement. Perhaps they will amuse you as well. "I was sure that when people saw my book they would say, 'It's even worse than I expected. Now one can really tell what she is like.' "

#16

Embracing the Strange

2013

In early 2012, Jason Erik Lundberg was asked to deliver a plenary talk to Singapore's best and brightest young creative writers. He chose to speak about the extraordinary impact of speculative fiction on every facet of his life, from childhood to the birth of his daughter, and beyond. This talk was expanded, and integrated with a multi-part short story about a brave little girl who tumbles down a very different kind of rabbit hole, and must use her bravery and intelligence in order to find her way home. The result is a 14,000-word hybrid-essay of such power and poignancy that the real and the imagined become inextricably mixed.

#17

Circle Line

2013

Ultimately pragmatic—and yet a contradiction in terms—the 'Circle Line' is a daily metaphor for journeys that take us back to the same place: but not quite. Again and again, and differently each time, every stop becomes a starting-point for us to consider what happens when our circles align, or when our lines, as in these pages, come full circle.

#18

hyperlinkage

2013

hyperlinkage is an experiment with a central hypothesis: that words can connect disparate points of view, plural experiences, multifarious crystallisations of the imagination. Each poem contains an image that recurs in the next; between different poems, different links are uncovered. But what holds them all together? In a hyperlink age, we must engage in hyper linkage. We are more interconnected but also more distrustful of universality. The last poem both loops back to the first and projects into the future a hope, an ushering in of the transcendent that so many seem to have lost sight of. hyperlinkage is a beginning.

Authors

Alvin Pang

Author · 5 books

Alvin PANG is a poet, writer, editor, anthologist, and translator. Writing primarily in English, his poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages, and he has appeared in major festivals and anthologies worldwide. A Fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2002), his publications include Testing the Silence (1997), City of Rain (2003), What Gives Us Our Names (2011). The anthologies he has curated include No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry (2000); Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia (co-edited with John Kinsella, 2008), and Tumasik: Contemporary Writing from Singapore (Autumn Hill: USA, 2009). His most recent volumes of poetry, OTHER THINGS AND OTHER POEMS (Brutal:Croatia), Teorija strun ["String Theory"] (JKSD:Slovenia) and WHEN THE BARBARIANS ARRIVE (Arc Publications,UK), were published in 2012. His latest book is WHAT HAPPENED: Poems 1997-2017. Listed in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English (2nd Edition), Pang is a founding director of The Literary Centre – a non-profit initiative promoting interdisciplinary capacity, multilingual communication, and positive social change. Among other public engagements, he is on the board of the International Poetry Studies Institute, and the editor-in-chief of an internationally circulated public policy journal. Pang was named the 2005 Young Artist of the Year for Literature by Singapore’s National Arts Council, and was conferred the Singapore Youth Award (Arts and Culture) in 2007.

Jason Erik Lundberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, and has lived in Singapore since 2007. His latest publications are his first novel (and 25th book), A Fickle and Restless Weapon (2020), a related novella, Diary of One Who Disappeared (2019, recipient of a 2013 Creation Grant from Singapore's National Arts Council), and a "greatest hits" short fiction collection, Most Excellent and Lamentable: Selected Stories (2019). He is also the author of many books for adults—including Red Dot Irreal (2011), The Alchemy of Happiness (2012), Strange Mammals (2013), and Embracing the Strange (2013); books for children—the six-book Bo Bo and Cha Cha picture book series (2012–2015) and Carol the Coral (2016); and more than a hundred short stories, articles, and book reviews. His writing has been translated into half a dozen languages, and seen publication in venues such as Mānoa, the Raleigh News & Observer, Farrago’s Wainscot, Hot Metal Bridge, Strange Horizons, Subterranean Magazine, The Third Alternative, Electric Velocipede, and many other places. His work has also been shortlisted for the SLF Fountain Award, Brenda L. Smart Award for Short Fiction, SCBWI Crystal Kite Member Choice Award, and POPULAR Readers’ Choice Award; he was honourably mentioned twice in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Lundberg has been the fiction editor at Epigram Books since 2012, where he jump-started the publisher's fiction line; many of the books he's edited since have won multiple national awards, and made various year’s best lists. He has also served as a prose mentor with Singapore's Creative Arts Programme and Ceriph Mentorship Programme. In addition, he is the founding editor of LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction (2012–2018), series editor for the biennial Best New Singaporean Short Stories anthology series (est. 2013), editor of Fish Eats Lion Redux (2022) and Fish Eats Lion (2012), and co-editor of A Field Guide to Surreal Botany (2008) and Scattered, Covered, Smothered (2004). From 2005–2008, he facilitated an occasional podcast called Lies and Little Deaths: A Virtual Anthology. An active member in PEN America and a 2002 graduate of the prestigious Clarion Writers Workshop, Lundberg holds a Master's degree in creative writing from North Carolina State University, and was a 2023 International Writer-in-Residence at the Toji Cultural Foundation Residency Program in South Korea.

Theophilus Kwek

Author · 4 books

Theophilus Kwek has published three poetry collections, Giving Ground (2016), They Speak Only Our Mother Tongue (2011) and Circle Line (2013), which was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. He is a winner of the Jane Martin Prize and the Martin Starkie Prize, and his poems have appeared in The London Magazine, The Interpreter’s House, the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, and various anthologies. He studies History and Politics at Merton College, Oxford, and is currently President of the Oxford University Poetry Society, as well as Content Advisor to the Oxford Culture Review.

Cyril Wong

Author · 22 books

Cyril Wong is a two-time Singapore Literature Prize-winning poet and the recipient of the Singapore National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award for Literature. His books include poetry collections Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light (2007) and The Lover’s Inventory (2015), novels The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza (2013) and This Side of Heaven (2020), and fiction collection Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me (2014). He completed his doctoral degree in English Literature at the National University of Singapore in 2012. His works have been featured in the Norton anthology, Language for a New Century, in Chinese Erotic Poems by Everyman’s Library, and in magazines and journals around the world. His writings have been translated into Turkish, German, Italian, French, Portuguese and Japanese.

Stephanie Ye

Author · 2 books

Stephanie Ye is a writer from Singapore, based in London. Her work has been staged as a dance performance in New York City, translated into German for an art exhibition in Berlin, and used as an O-level examination text in Singapore. Her short story chapbook, The Billion Shop, was published in 2012, and she edited the fiction anthology From The Belly Of The Cat in 2013. A graduate of the MA in Creative Writing programme at the University of East Anglia, she is also an honorary fellow in writing of the University of Iowa. When not writing for humans, she talks to computers in her day job as a web developer.

Hao Guang Tse (谢皓光) is the author of The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association (Tinfish Press, 2022) and Deeds of Light (Math Paper Press, 2015), the latter shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. He is a 2016 fellow of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, and the 2018 National Writer-in-Residence at Nanyang Technological University. His poems have been featured in Poem-a-Day, Tammy, New Delta Review, Pain, Minarets, Big Other, Hotel, Asian American Writers' Workshop, Entropy and elsewhere. He was born and raised in Singapore, where he continues to live and work.