For 2024, SUSPECT’s My Book of the Year features recommendations from 28 writers, artists, scholars, and thinkers, who share the reads that have stuck with them this year.
What is it like to be exiled from a colony, tribe, group and to be chained to a false name? Read the new story by Krystalle Teh.
Eunice Lim reviews A Dream Wants Waking by Lydia Kwa (Hamilton, Ontario: Buckrider Books, 2023).
Kwan Ann Tan reviews Cannibals by Shinya Tanaka, translated by Kalau Almony (United Kingdom: Honford Star, 2024).
Darkly subversive, as appropriate to the times, five works of speculative fiction from South Asia and the diaspora, reviewed by Ng Yi-Sheng.
Jonathan Chan talks to translator Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng about approaches to translation, notions of ephemerality, and modes of literary relationship.
Does the August Revolution in Bangladesh give cause for hope? Gaudy Boy author Mozid Mamud reflects on the revolution in the light of the country’s history of fissures.
The miracle of watermelons: what is it? A new story by Vũ Trọng Hiếu.
Yin F Lim reviews The Second Link: An Anthology of Malaysian & Singaporean Writing edited by Daryl Lim Wei Jie, Hamid Roslan, Melizarani T. Selva, William Tham.
In her review of Habitations by Sheila Sundar, Kristin T. Lee calls the fictional work “a subtle showstopper of a novel.”
What are the living connections between Indonesian and Chilean poetries? Damhuri Muhammad reviews the important binational anthology Para Lavida.
For the creepy month of October, Ng Yi-Sheng reviews hellish supernatural yarns from Singapore, Japan, Mexico, Canada and Croatia.
Robert Hirschfield pays an insightful and heartfelt tribute to a haiku master of South India.
Eunice Lim reviews Yellowface, a novel by R. F. Kuang.
In his essay about moving from Singapore to Germany, Thow Xin Wei reflects on what it means to learn a new language in order to fit in.
Hurt, like hammers, can be aimed at the wrong targets. How much can we trust the carpenter? Three new poems from Ally Chua.
Why does he carry a violin with him everywhere but is so reluctant to play it? An atmospheric new story by Niranjan Kumar Rai.
Apollos Michio reviews Missed Connections: Microfiction from Asia, edited by Felix Cheong and Noelle Q. de Jesus.
Brace yourself for a thrilling ride when Ng Yi-Sheng hops on the crime thriller train.
How different are we from the insects we admire and kill? Eric Abalajon translates three poems by the Filipino poet Jhio Jan Navarro.
In the new story “Moonlit Lake,” by Neo Xin Yuan, the ethnically Chinese narrator joins a special Singaporean school for the advanced study of Chinese language and culture and discovers a realm of differences.
In their review of The Box, an unusual novel by Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Eileen Ying looks for the seams between narrative and theory.
Like “the signpost that un-alives a robber”, the dangerous side of language is on full display in Nnadi Samuel’s stunning poems about power, land, pain, and Indigenous lineage.
How far would we go for social justice, and how would that youthful self be viewed afterwards? Lillian Tsay reflects on her involvement in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement in her essay “The Era I Had Loved.”
“In Southeast Asia, poetry is power.” Ng Yi-Sheng reviews five recent collections of Southeast Asian poetry.
A.C.S. Bird explores the many aspects of concealment and revelation in the poetry of Rooja Mohassessy.
What does one do with one’s loneliness? Ratu Yousei finds an answer in this tender story.
Reviewer Samara Choudhury discovers the Bene Israel community in India through Zilka Joseph’s poetry collection Sweet Malida.
In this poignant essay, Monisha Raman finds her way in the maze of grief by walking.
Ashley Marilynne Wong reviews Elaine Chiew’s novel The Light Between Us.