INTERROGATION RECORDS
by Jeddie Sophronius
ISBN: 978-1-958652-07-7
$16.00 / Paperback / 5.5” x 8.5" / 120 pages
Gaudy Boy, April 2024
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The winner of the 2023 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, selected by Divya Victor.
Breaking the silence and collective amnesia around the Indonesian mass killings of 1965.
LOVELIER, LONELIER
by Daryl Qilin Yam
ISBN: 978-1-958652-04-6
eISBN: 978-1-958652-05-3
$24.00 / Paperback / 6” x 9" / 424 pages
Gaudy Boy, February 2024
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Longlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award
Finalist for the 2021 Epigram Books Fiction Prize
In this time-hopping and genre-defying novel, the passing of the Great Comet of 1996 sets in motion a series of inexplicable events in Kyoto, changing the lives of four friends forever.
"Casts a beguiling spell." –Rachel Heng, author of The Great Reclamation
BENGAL HOUND
by Rahad Abir
9781958652022
$19.00 / Paperback / 5.5” x 8.5" / 228 pages
Gaudy Boy, October 1, 2023
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Highlighted in The Daily Star’s 2023 Books in Review
“A story full of gravity and urgency.”
—Ha Jin, author of A Song Everlasting
A love story unravels in the tumultuous years leading up to the war for Bangladeshi Independence, revealing the irreconcilable fissures of land and life.
WAKING UP TO THE PATTERN LEFT BY A SNAIL OVERNIGHT
by Jim Pascual Agustin
978-1-958652-00-8
$16.00 / Paperback / 5.5” x 8.5" / 94 pages
Gaudy Boy, April 1, 2023
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“Everything everywhere all at once, yet intimately, pulsatingly at home.” - Yeow Kai Chai, winner of the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize
A gathering of voices from nature, pop culture, and human corruption, this “crystalline” collection asks what it means to live in danger, and how to break free.
Winner of the 2022 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize
SUSPECT: VOLUME 1, YEAR 1
Editors:
Editor-in-Chief: Jee Leong Koh
Essay: Jerrine Tan, Prasanthi Ram, and Alysha Chandra
Fiction: Sharmini Aphrodite
Poetry: Marylyn Tan
Interview: Jade Onn and Janelle Tan
Review: Maggie Wang and Miranda Jeyaretnam
Art: Miki Wang
Web: Emily von Borstel
With Assistant Editor, Gaudy Boy: Isabel Drake
978-1-958652-01-5
$16.00 / Paperback / 8.5" x 11" / 164 pages
February 22, 2022
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Brimming with voices at once manifold yet singular, SUSPECT: VOLUME 1, YEAR 1 showcases a selection of Asian writers hailing from Canada, China, India, Israel, Malaysia, Singapore, the UK, the US, and elsewhere. The anthology, which celebrates one year of SUSPECT journal’s digital publishing, offers new perspectives from emerging literary voices. Boldly, yet always compassionately, these contributors demand of their readers an imagination expansive enough to inhabit geographical borders, subverted conventions, diverse subjectivities, and lives recorded from the margins.
NEW SINGAPORE POETRIES
edited by Marylyn Tan and Jee Leong Koh
978-0-9994514-9-6
$22.00 / Paperback / 6" x 9" / 320 pages
Gaudy Boy, December 1, 2022
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A bold showing of voice, uniqueness, nerve, and precision from a new generation of Singapore poets.
Wrapping itself, tasting, luxuriating in the recurrent themes of the body, family, sexuality, spirituality, neo-colonialism, geographies, positionalities, identity, and nationalism, New Singapore Poetries brims with the ambition and talent of 18 of Singapore’s newest poetic voices, many hitherto unpublished.
AMANAT: WOMEN’S WRITING FROM KAZAKHSTAN
edited by Zaure Batayeva and Shelley Fairweather-Vega
978-0-9994514-8-9
$22.00 / Paperback / 5.5" x 8.5" / 296 pages
Gaudy Boy, July 1, 2022
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S.E. Asia: In the best bookstores
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Words Without Borders’ Best Books of 2022
World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2022
Ms Magazine’s July 2022 Reads for the Rest of Us
The Millions’ Most Anticipated: The Great 2nd-Half 2022 Book Preview
Reviewed in The Millions
An unprecedented collection of women’s voices from the heart of Central Asia.
From the foreword by Gabriel Mcguire: “I cannot think of anything quite like … Amanat.”
Diverse in form, scope and style, Amanat brings together the voices of 13 female Kazakhstani writers, to offer a glimpse into the many lives, stories, and histories of one of the largest countries to emerge from the breakup of the Soviet Union.
TIME REGIME: POEMS
by Jhani Randhawa
978-0-9994514-7-2
$16.00 / Paperback / 6" x 9" / 144 pages
Gaudy Boy, April 1, 2022
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S.E. Asia: In the best bookstores
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Winner of the 2021 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize
Gold Medal, California Book Awards
A collection of experiments, mechanical dream logs, epistolaries, and field notes, Time Regime (April 2022, Gaudy Boy) — winner of the 2021 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize — assembles an emergent mutant body intent on interrupting neoliberal imperialism’s rhythms and expectations.
PICKING OFF NEW SHOOTS WILL NOT STOP THE SPRING: WITNESS POEMS AND ESSAYS FROM BURMA/MYANMAR 1988-2021
edited by Ko Ko Thett & Brian Haman
978-0999451465
$22.00 / Paperback / 5.1" x 7.9" / 264 pages
Gaudy Boy, January 29, 2022
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The Economist’s 1 of 7 Books to Read about Myanmar
A feast for the literary imagination, an elegy to those who have fallen, and a courageous act of defiance by those that continue to fight, these firsthand accounts provide a window into a crucial moment in Myanmar’s history.
THE INFINITE LIBRARY AND OTHER STORIES
by Victor Fernando R. Ocampo
978-0-9994514-5-8
$19.00 / Paperback / 5.5" x 8.5" / 306 pages
Gaudy Boy, October 1, 2021
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Singapore: Word Image
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Featuring a never-before-anthologized story
Shortlisted for the 2018 International Rubery Book Award
Reviewed in Publishers Weekly
A Book Riot 11 Must-read Filipino Sci-fi Books
Making his North American debut, Victor Fernando R. Ocampo in The Infinite Library and Other Stories shows why Southeast Asian speculative fiction is a force to be reckoned with.
From a mysteriously timeless interior of a map shop to a space elevator thousands of miles away from the metropole, these 18 stories masterfully straddle manifold layers of Filipino history, identity, and mythology, reconstructing the past and conjuring new futures for the nation and region at large.
THE SWEETEST FRUITS: A NOVEL
By Monique Truong
9780999451441
$24 (SGD) / Paperback / 5.5 x 8.5 / 310 pages
Gaudy Boy, May 18, 2021
Singapore and Malaysia: In the best bookstores
Singapore: Word Image
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With a new afterword by the author
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
2020 John Gardner Fiction Book Award Winner
A Mental Floss and PopMatters Best Books of 2019
A Publishers Weekly Best Fiction Books of 2019
With brilliant sensitivity and an unstinting eye, The Sweetest Fruits circumnavigates the globe, introducing three unforgettable women, separated by geography and culture but connected by their love for the Greek-Irish author Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904). This edition comes with a new afterword by the author.
OBJECT PERMANENCE: POEMS
by Nica Bengzon
978-0999451434
$16.00/Paperback/5.5” x 8.5”/136pg
Gaudy Boy, April 1, 2021
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Singapore: Word Image
S.E. Asia: In the best bookstores
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Winner of the 2020 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize
Ms. Magazine’s 2021 Poetry for the Rest of Us
An urgent debut by poet Nica Bengzon, demanding a reckoning with what it means to be healthy against a backdrop of widespread illness and violence. Selected as the third winner of the annual Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize (2020) by Singapore Literature Prize-winning poet Cyril Wong.
ULIRÁT: BEST CONTEMPORARY STORIES IN TRANSLATION FROM THE PHILIPPINES
edited by Tilde Acuña, John Bengan, Daryll Delgado, Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III, Kristine Ong Muslim
978-0-9994514-2-7
$22.00/Paperback/5.5” x 8.5”/378pg
Gaudy Boy, March 1, 2021
N. America: Asterism / Bookshop / Amazon
S.E. Asia: In the best bookstores
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ArtsEquator’s Hot List
TimeOut’s 14 new books we’re excited to read
Words Without Borders, The Watchlist, March 2021
Poets & Writers, "The Anthologist: A Compendium of Uncommon Collections"
CNN Philippines, Our Best Filipino Books of 2021
A groundbreaking survey of contemporary Philippine short fiction across seven different languages. From the foreword by Gina Apostol: “As a Filipino who dreams in Waray, I have waited too long for Ulirát.”
AND THE WALLS COME CRUMBLING DOWN
by Tania De Rozario
978-0999451403
$16.00/Paperback/5.5" x 8.5"/144pg
Gaudy Boy, October 1, 2020
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Finalist for Lambda Literary Awards
Ms. Magazine’s October read
Part queer memoir and part poetic rumination, And The Walls Come Crumbling Down lays bare the love, pain, and precarity experienced by those who must forge their own home.
PLAY FOR TIME: POEMS
by Paula Mendoza
978-0982814277
$16.00/Paperback/5.5" x 8.5"/96pg
Gaudy Boy, May 1, 2020
N. America: Asterism / Bookshop / Amazon
S.E. Asia: In the best bookstores
E-Book: Kindle
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Winner of the 2019 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, selected by Vijay Seshadri
Reviewed in Publishers Weekly
Playful and deliberate, innovative and strange, Play for Time, Mendoza's debut collection of experimental lyric poems, demolishes the literary commonplaces of "universality" and provides a timely introduction to an explosively original voice in poetry.
MALAY SKETCHES: STORIES
by Alfian Sa’at
978-0-9828142-3-9
$16.95/Paperback/5" x 8"/212pg
Gaudy Boy, March 1, 2018
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Electric Literature: 1 of 7 short-story collections to read in 2018
An urgent collection of short stories from one of Singapore’s most celebrated voices, published in America for the first time. Precise yet universal, grounded yet probing, Malay Sketches gives us a prismatic window into the doubly minoritized Malay-Muslim community in Singapore.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HORSE: A POEM
by Jenifer Sang Eun Park
978-0-9828142-4-6
$16.00/Paperback/5.5" x 8.5"/90pg
Gaudy Boy, April 6, 2019
N. America: Asterism / Bookshop / Amazon
S.E. Asia: In the best bookstores
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Co-winner of 1st Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, selected by Wong May
Paris Review Staff Pick
Featured on Poetry Daily
Honorable Mention in the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in Creative Writing: Poetry
A frenetic tour of a splayed self writing through an equine obsession. Presented in lyrical prose, diagrams, photos, and conceptual excerpts from imagined texts, Autobiography of Horse pieces together a true story spurred by a tormented, pathological, and, ultimately, redemptive imagination.
THE FOLEY ARTIST: STORIES
by Ricco Villanueva Siasoco
978-0982814260
$16.00/Paperback/5.5” x 8.5”/156pg
Gaudy Boy, October 1, 2019
N. America: Asterism / Bookshop / Amazon
S.E. Asia: In the best bookstores
E-Book: Kindle
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Honorable Mention in the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in Creative Writing: Prose
At once deliciously bizarre and painfully familiar, The Foley Artist introduces a vital new voice to Asian American literature. Ricco Villanueva Siasoco's powerful debut collection opens new regions of American feeling and thought as it interrogates intimacy, foreignness, and silence in an absurd world.
THE EXPERIMENT OF THE TROPICS: POEMS
by Lawrence Lacambra Ypil
978-0-9828142-5-3
$16.00/Paperback/6" x 9"/64pg
Gaudy Boy, April 6, 2019
N. America: Asterism / Bookshop / Amazon
Singapore: Word Image
S.E. Asia: In the best bookstores
Distributed by Asterism & Ingram
Co-winner of 1st Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, selected by Wong May
Finalist for Lambda Literary Awards
Longlisted for The Believer Book Awards
The Millions: 1 of 6 must-read books
Returning to early-twentieth-century Philippine photographs during the time of American occupation, The Experiment of the Tropics asks, “How does one look at the past?”
"Gaudy Boy is so amazing and I never would have imagined myself publishing with an indie press that has an explicit mission to further Asian and Asian American voices. One important thing I’ve learned from the publisher, Jee Leong Koh, is thinking about transnational publishing. I’m Asian American, I have a very strong American individualist identity. And to think about how the book could appear in Singapore or Malaysia, how Asian readers would interpret it, has been fascinating. So that was a whole dimension of feeling, as Gaudy Boy would put it, that I’d never thought of."—Ricco Villaneuva Siasoco
From Latin gaudium meaning “joy,” Gaudy Boy publishes books that delight readers with the various powers of art. The name is taken from the poem “Gaudy Turnout” by Singaporean author Arthur Yap, about his time abroad in Leeds, UK. Similarly inspired by such diasporic wanderings and migrations, Gaudy Boy brings literary works by authors of Asian heritage to the attention of an American audience. Established in 2018 as the imprint of the NYC-based literary non-profit Singapore Unbound, we publish poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction. To submit a fiction or literary non-fiction manuscript, please query Jee Leong Koh at jkoh@singaporeunbound.org with the completed book proposal below. For poetry manuscripts, please submit to our annual Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Contest (submission period: February 15 to May 15). Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Books by our other imprint Bench Press
SAMPLE AND LOOP: A SIMPLE HISTORY OF SINGAPOREANS IN AMERICA
by Jee Leong Koh
$16.00 / Paperback / 5.5” x 8.5” / 162 pages
Gaudy Boy, November 2023
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Singapore: Word Image
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A new Canterbury Tales for our time, Sample and Loop tells the story of the migration of Singaporeans to the United States of America, rendering the surprising trajectory of lived experience in musical verse.
SNOW AT 5 PM: TRANSLATIONS OF AN INSIGNIFICANT JAPANESE POET
by Jee Leong Koh
$13.80 / Paperback / 5.5” x 8.5” / 402 pages
Gaudy Boy, September 10, 2020
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Singapore: Word Image
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Winner, 2022 Singapore Literature Prize
Necessary Fiction’s Recommended Reading 2020
The rescue of a literary manuscript results in a war of words over the interpretation of 107 haiku about New York’s Central Park. In the battle of commentaries, what is at stake is nothing less than the meaning of America in an imaginary but highly plausible future. Reenvisioning Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire for a technologized age, Snow at 5 PM discovers revolutionary uses, and abuses, for literature and history.
EQUAL TO THE EARTH: POEMS
by Jee Leong Koh
978-1482739701
$15.00 / Paperback / 6” x 9” / 95 pages
Bench Press, July, 2009
N. America: Bookshop / Amazon
In his first full-length collection, Koh speaks with a range of voices—ancestral, recent, and contemporary—and travels a span of ground to investigate the imaginary claims of community and self. At the center of this investigation, as of the book, lies the great question of love.
LIGHTLY IN THE GOOD OF DAY: POEMS
by Bob Hart
$15.00 / Paperback / 6” x 9” / 84 pages
Bench Press, July 2, 2010
N. America: Lulu / Amazon
Bob Hart is a joker, a trickster, a gambler. He plays with life for the highest stakes, nothing less than immortality, fullness, significance. Not for him the solemn approach to these ponderous subjects, but the sleight-of-hand to match, and trump, chance, emptiness, and transience. A pun, an accident of language, may be endowed by poetry with meaning. In Bob’s hands, a stone may be “a well of things well felt.”
SEVEN STUDIES FOR A SELF PORTRAIT: POEMS
by Jee Leong Koh
978-0982814222
$15.00 / Paperback / 6” x 9” / 124 pages
Bench Press, January 6, 2011
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Seven Studies for a Self Portrait, Jee Leong Koh's third book of poems, subjects the self to an increasingly complex series of personal investments and investigations. Ever-evolving, ever-improvisatory, the self appears first as a suite of seven ekphrastic poems, then as free verse profiles, riddles, sonnet sequences, and finally a divan of forty-nine ghazals. The discovery the book makes at the end is that the self sees itself best when it is not by itself.
TRY TO HAVE YOUR WRITING MAKE SENSE: THE QUINTESSENTIAL PFFA ANTHOLOGY: POEMS
edited by Donna Smith and Howard Miller
$15.00 / Paperback / 6” x 9” / 52 pages
Bench Press, November 3, 2013
N. America: Bookshop / Amazon
The first ever poetry anthology from the premier online workshop Poetry Free-for-all. Edited by workshop moderators Howard Miller and Donna Smith, this volume presents the writing of new and established poets. The contributors, who come from all over the world, are Emilio Aguilera, David Gwilym Anthony, Margit Berman, Nicolette Bethel, Rachael Briggs, Laurie Clemens, Malinda Crispin, Risa Denenberg, Vicky MacDonald Harris, M.E. Hope, Rene Kennedy, Jee Leong Koh, Mike Lane, Anne Lindsay, Gaye McKenney, Howard Miller, Donna Smith, Suzanne Tidei, Meredith Weiers, and Dave Wiseman.