translations to the tanglish is a collection of the 44 greatest-ever poems from the tang dynasty and song dynasty, dodgily “translated” into (1) english; (2) 2021; (3) singapore; (4) a pandemic. so su dongpo never used zoom, and du fu never caught covid-19; so li bai never drank lagavulin and wang wei never went to little india. but hey, none of them ever spoke english either. flip on, or scroll down, or swipe through. in a world where every other poem is about the moon, our modern moon is a...

“In Chinese, I am always 16,” observes Clara Chow in her debut poetry collection. These poems written in Chinese – and the author’s own English translation – are an experiment in bilingualism: How am I a different person in a different language? Simple, direct and heart-felt, this book is an attempt to connect with a fictional beloved, a love letter to a mother tongue, and a reclamation of a dormant self. 多情的人与多情的城相遇擦出了火花，而《几首烂情诗》诞生了。谁说情诗必须有对象？《几首烂情诗》是赵燕芬的第一本双语诗集，以一双带着童真浪漫的眼睛给平凡的世界添上了颜色。 Pap...

How Now Blown Crow is a sequence of poems which follows the relationship between two divorcees starting a new life together after their respective marriages have failed. Between ghosts of past loves, quotidian domestic and natural spaces, states of sleep and wakefulness, and the desire for rootedness and migration, the collection spans several decades from youth into old age. How Now Blown Crow is a poetry collection about sustaining a relationship in spite of the dubious nature of love. Hard...

We are currently accepting pre-orders for this title. Orders of this title are expected to be fulfilled by late-October 2021. Click here to find out more about when your pre-order will ship. Preview Chapter – 'You' (1/12) An art student chances upon a former fling at Punggol MRT station. A reporter lies awake at four in the morning, chronically unable to sleep. Two men lie in bed, watching YouTube videos of hail falling in Singapore, while a sugar baby trawls through Google Maps, exploring th...

EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices is a landmark literary project, gathering the best works of local LGBTQ writers who emerged in the 2010s. These writings reveal the dreams, struggles and indomitable spirit of our queer community in a time of turbulence and transformation—a decade of highly visible protests and controversies, new labels for gender and sexuality, and a more fearless brand of cultural politics. This collection features texts written in English, Mandarin, Malay and ...

A Luxury: Omnibus Edition is simultaneously a time capsule and a time-machine. The first volume, A Luxury We Cannot Afford, bottled the lightning of poetry, prose and plays in 2015. The second, A Luxury We Must Afford, took a leap forward into the unknown future of Singapore. You will find something to please and pique every reader in this anthology. Hardback: 398 PagesProduct Dimensions: 140 x 205 mmISBN: 9789811809002Signed Edition with Dust Jacket is limited to 30 copies Published by Math ...

These poems walk through cities in bodies that don’t belong. They speak through moments in migration, music, film and pop culture. These are poems as acts of resistance, renewal and reclamation. Poems that make shrines of grimy corners. They are dancing till the sun comes up and laughing in the face of anyone who says they cannot take up space. Hardback: 156 PagesProduct Dimensions: 140 x 205 mmISBN: 9789811491450Signed Edition with Dust Jacket is limited to 50 copies Published by Math Paper ...

White, New Jersey wastoid Sean Kerry is fresh out of jail, working at a dead-end burger stand on the shore. His Black parole officer, James O'Keefe, has threatened to kill Sean if he gets high again, and ruins O'Keefe's chances for a promotion. At an adjacent hotel, a South Asian couple, the Angrywalls, are seeing their marriage tested by poor business and racist harrassment from the anonymous Dotbusters. When Sean's co-worker disappears, all four of their lives will collide and be changed fo...

Illustrated by Shu Cake is one of a kind – the one that is more judgemental than you. Cake has all the hoomanz wrapped around his paws, as you will be mesmerised by his ocean blue eyes. Join Cake as he has 'fun' during play time with fun adventures and interactive cat-tastic activities! Meet Pico, everyone's cat best friend! She spends her days snuggling with hoomanz, getting belly rubs, watching the world from the window and dreaming about food. For Pico, it is always meal o'clock. Join Pico...

Illustrated by Shu Cake is one of a kind – the one that is more judgemental than you. Cake has all the hoomanz wrapped around his paws, as you will be mesmerised by his ocean blue eyes. Join Cake as he has 'fun' during play time with fun adventures and interactive cat-tastic activities! Haven't got enough of our cats? Join us in this three part series of our resident cats, Cake, Pico and Lemon, showcasing their daily life judging hoomanz, craving for food and being the real bosses of BooksAct...

Illustrated by Shu Meet Pico, everyone's cat best friend! She spends her days snuggling with hoomanz, getting belly rubs, watching the world from the window and dreaming about food. For Pico, it is always meal o'clock. Join Pico during lunch time with fun adventures and interactive cat-tastic activities! Haven't got enough of our cats? Join us in this three part series of our resident cats, Cake, Pico and Lemon, showcasing their daily life judging hoomanz, craving for food and being the real ...

Illustrated by Shu Easy peasy Lemon squeezy, but our resident cat, Lemon, is not an easy one. A feisty monster who loves sunshine, scratching posts, her hoomanz and naps. Join Lemon during her nap time with fun adventures and interactive cat-tastic activities! Haven't got enough of our cats? Join us in this three part series of our resident cats, Cake, Pico and Lemon, showcasing their daily life judging hoomanz, craving for food and being the real bosses of BooksActually. Hardback: 48 PagesPr...

Translated by Bruno Navasky The streets of Tokyo swarm below fifteen year-old Copper as he gazes out into the city of his childhood. Struck by the thought of the infinite people whose lives play out alongside his own, he begins to wonder, how do you live? Considering life's biggest questions for the first time, Copper turns to his dear uncle for heart-warming wisdom. As the old man guides the boy on a journey of philosophical discovery, a timeless tale unfolds, offering a poignant reflection ...

What is the true cost of living as a young person in 21st-century England? It's autumn 2018 and a young woman moves into a rented room in university accommodation, ready to begin a job as a research assistant at Oxford. Here, living and working in the spaces that have birthed the country's leaders, she is both outsider and insider, and she can't shake the feeling that real life is happening elsewhere. Eight months later she finds herself in London. She's landed a temp contract at a society ma...

One year after the death of his beloved musician father, thirteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house – a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn’t understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous. At first Benny...

Immigrant. Socialite. Magician. Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society--she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She's also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her. But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all p...

A woman invites a famed artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives, in the belief that his vision will penetrate the mystery of her life and landscape. Over the course of one hot summer, his provocative presence provides the frame for a study of female fate and male privilege, of the geometries of human relationships, and of the struggle to live morally between our internal and external worlds. With its examination of the possibility that art can both save and destroy us, Seco...

Translated by Sung Ryu "For her endless interest in and advice for me, I was grateful as I was increasingly resentful. I felt that she was trampling on the boundaries of “me,” rudely trespassing on the space that was “me.” She was far away yet much too close to me. I couldn’t stand her love, which did not reject even the ugliest of my faces. I couldn’t stand it because I had been afraid of being loved from the beginning." In crisp, unembellished prose, Choi Eunyoung paints intimate portraits...

How do you grieve, if your family doesn’t talk about feelings? This is the question the unnamed protagonist of Ghost Forest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong “astronaut” fathers, he stays there to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Canada before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China. As she revisits memories of her father through the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings. Turning t...

"Congratulations, you've won the lottery!" shouts the angel Prapura to a formless soul. The soul hasn't been kicked out of the cycle of rebirth just yet—he's been given a second chance. He must recall the biggest mistake of his past life while on 'homestay' in the body of fourteen-year-old Makoto Kobayashi, who has just committed suicide. It looks like Makoto doesn't have a single friend, and his family don't seem to care about him at all. But as the soul begins to live Makoto's life on his o...

The first English-language publication of the work of Izumi Suzuki, a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon. In a future where men are contained in ghettoised isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia—until a boy escapes and a young woman’s perception of the world is violently interrupted. The last family in a desolate city struggles to approximate twentieth- century life on Earth, lifting what notions they can from 1960s popular culture. But bene...

Translated by S. R. Fellowes General Alwany is a pious man who loves his family. He also tortures and kills enemies of the state. Under the regime of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt is gripped by cronyism, religious hypocrisy, and the oppressive military. Now, however, the regime faces its greatest crisis. The idealistic young from different backgrounds - engineers, teachers, medical students, and among them the general's daughter - have come together to challenge the status quo. Euphoria mounts as Muba...

From the bestselling and Booker Prize winning author of Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, a stunning new novel - his first since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature - that asks, what does it mean to love? The novel tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will so...

An African nation's struggle for independence is interwoven with a tragic love story in this compelling novel. When Ofeyi, who writes advertising jingles for the Cocoa Corporation, is sent on a promotional tour of his unnamed country, he arrives at a coastal village whose remote location has long kept it insulated from the corrupt national government. Here Ofeyi discovers a traditional way of life that is still flourishing and he is inspired to spread its life-affirming values to his sufferin...

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As you know, we are an independent bookstore. We might not be as big or as accessible as various commercial bookstores, but this comes with its perks too. We get to specially curate our books, talk to our customers and find out what you really like (and more importantly, dislike). Under this membership, we would like to send you books that we publish here at BooksActually, under our publishing imprint - Math Paper Press. These titles will be specially curated by us and you can expect new rele...

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Illustrated by Shu Do you want to ‘Huat’ or enter the world of astrological predictions? Can’t decide? Our resident cats are here to give you the best of both world! This 2-sheet sticker pack features our cats disguised as the various Horoscope and Zodiac signs. What signs do you think Cake, Pico, and Lemon are? A Product of BooksActually

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Illustrated by Shu Whether you like collecting postcards, want to mail them to a loved one or simply just love cats, our postcards are ‘purrrrfect’ to satisfy all your needs. A set of four A6 postcards featuring our resident cats – Cake, Pico, and Lemon! A Product of BooksActually

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Silkscreened on cotton, this classic tote bag is perfect for all your tomes and treasures. Filled with memories, our Yong Siak store has set the foundation of who we are today. With our shift online, our Upper Weld shophouse represents a new beginning for us and we're extremely thankful for all the support we've gotten. These tote bags are symbolic of our journey as a BooksActually family.  The Yong Siak Tote has our ever-recognisable Yong Siak Street storefront printed on one side.  The Uppe...

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Sometimes, we need a quote to keep us going. Now, you can keep some quotes in your pocket and bring it around as you travel. Whether it serves as a form of motivation or a reminder, this will definitely be a brilliant pick-me-up to have! Every cover is unique. Hand-stitched and manually typewritten with famous quotations from authors, philosophers, artists, and thinkers. Available Quotes: “The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.” — Maya Angelou “The...

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