Amanda Lee Koe

A dazzling debut novel following the lives of three groundbreaking women--Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl--cinema legends who lit up the twentieth century At a chance encounter at a Berlin soirée in 1928, the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captures three very different women together in one frame: up-and-coming German actress Marlene Dietrich, who would wend her way into Hollywood as one of its lasting icons; Anna May Wong, the world's first Chinese American star, playing for bit parts while dreaming of breaking away from her father's modest laundry; and Leni Riefenstahl, whose work as a director would first make her famous--then, infamous. From this curious point of intersection, Delayed Rays of a Star lets loose the trajectories of these women's lives. From Weimar Berlin to LA's Chinatown, from a seaside resort in East Germany to a luxury apartment on the Champs-Élysées, the different settings they inhabit are as richly textured as the roles they play: siren, muse, predator, or lover, each one a carefully calibrated performance. And in the orbit of each star live secondary players--a Chinese immigrant housemaid, a German soldier on leave from North Africa, a pompous Hollywood director--whose voices and viewpoints reveal the legacy each woman left in her own time, as well as in ours. Amanda Lee Koe's playful, wry prose guides the reader dexterously around murky questions of ego, persona, complicity, desire, and difference. Intimate and raw, Delayed Rays of a Star is a visceral depiction of womanhood--its particular hungers, its calculations, and its eventual betrayals--and announces a bold new literary voice.

Delayed Rays of a Star

A glittering, bold, darkly funny novel about two sisters—one in New York, one in Singapore—who are bound by an ancient secret Sisterhood is difficult for Su and Emerald. Su leads a sheltered, moneyed life as the picture-perfect wife of a conservative politician in Singapore. Emerald is a nihilistic sugar baby in New York, living from whim to whim as she freely uses her beauty and charms to make ends meet. But they share a secret: once they were snakes, basking under a full moon in Tang Dynasty China. A thousand years later, their mysterious history is the only thing still binding them together. When Emerald experiences a violent encounter in Central Park, and Su boards the next flight to New York, the two reach a tenuous reconciliation for the first time in decades. Su convinces Emerald to move to Singapore so she can keep an eye on her—but she soon begins to worry that Emerald’s irrepressible behavior will out them both in an affluent city where everything runs like clockwork, but no deviation from the norm can be tolerated. Dark, hilarious, razor-sharp, and raw in emotion, Sister Snake explores chosen family, queerness, passing, and the struggle against conformity. Boldly reimagining the Chinese folktale the Legend of the White Snake, this is a novel about being seen for who you are—and, ultimately, how to live free.

A Novel

Sister Snake

Ministerstwo moralnej paniki

Winner of Best Fiction Title for Singapore Book Awards 2016 Winner of the Singapore Literature Prize for Fiction 2014 Longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award 2014 Selected by The Business Times as one of the Top 10 English Singapore books from 1965–2015 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. Rehash national icons: the truth about racial riot fodder-girl Maria Hertogh 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. 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 fictions that plough, relentlessly, the possibilities of understanding Singapore and her denizens discursively, off-centre. Ministry of Moral Panic is an extraordinary debut collection and the introduction of a revelatory new voice.

Ministry of Moral Panic

Samrat Upadhyay

Djenar Maesa Ayu

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay

Feng Tang

Guo Songfen

Lin Yi-yun

Mae Yway

Baast Zolbayar

Fernando Sylvan

Shahria Sharmin

Ren Xiaowen

La revue semestrielle Jentayu (ISSN 2426-2536) est dédiée à la traduction de textes courts ou d'extraits de roman. À chaque numéro, entre douze et quinze textes provenant d'une variété de pays et de régions d'Asie sont sélectionnés sur un thème donné et traduits par des traducteurs chevronnés. Pour certains de ces textes, ils sont aussi mis en contexte sur le site internet de Jentayu par le biais d'un entretien avec l'auteur, le traducteur, ou d'une présentation de son traducteur. Pour le plaisir des yeux, un illustrateur asiatique est invité à imaginer des créations visuelles en lien avec chacune des nouvelles. Enfin, à chaque nouveau numéro, la revue met aussi en avant les travaux d'un photographe asiatique au travers d'un carnet dédié. Ce sixième numéro, sur le thème "Amours et Sensualités", est consacré aux relations amoureuses, superficielles ou profondes, à la sensualité et à l’érotisme tels qu’ils sont vécus et écrits aujourd’hui à travers l’Asie, dans toute leur diversité, leur complexité... et leur ferveur. Textes en traduction française de : Djenar Maesa Ayu (Indonésie), Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay (Inde), Feng Tang (Chine), Guo Songfen (Taiwan), Amanda Lee Koe (Singapour), Lin Yi-yun (Taiwan), Ren Xiaowen (Chine), Fernando Sylvan (Timor oriental), Samrat Upadhyay (Népal), Mae Yway (Birmanie) et Baast Zolbayar (Mongolie). Photographies de Shahria Sharmin (Bangladesh). Illustrations de Charis Loke (Malaisie).

Jentayu - Numéro 6 - Amours et Sensualités

Jeremy Tiang

O Thiam Chin

Cyril Wong

Alvin Pang

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

Dave Chua

Jason Erik Lundberg

Felix Cheong

Ann Ang

Verena Tay

Ng Yi-Sheng

Stephanie Ye

Justin Ker

Vinita Ramani Mohan

Karen Kwek

Koh Choon Hwee

Eleanor Neo

Wei Fen Lee

Phan Ming Yen

Alfian Sa’at

In recent years, Singaporean literature has begun experiencing a sea change, with the short story form enjoying a renaissance. As a result, an explosion of short fiction with a Singaporean flavour has been produced to incredible effect, both by emerging and established writers. For the prose enthusiast, it is a very exciting time. The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume One curates the finest short fiction from Singaporean writers published in 2011 and 2012. This ground-breaking and unique anthology showcases stories that examine various facets of the human condition and the truths that we tell ourselves in order to exist in the everyday. The styles are as varied as the authors, and no two pieces are alike. Here are twenty unique and breathtaking literary insights into the Singaporean psyche, which examine what it means to live in this particular part of the world in this particular time.

Volume One

The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories

Amanda Lee Koe

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