If you are going going to the 2024 AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference & Bookfair in Kansas City, Missouri this February 7–10, don’t forget to get a copy of my book, The Infinite Library and Other Stories, as well as all these other great books by outstanding Asian authors!
The AWP Conference & Bookfair is the annual destination for writers, teachers, students, editors, and publishers of contemporary creative writing. It includes thousands of attendees, hundreds of events and bookfair exhibitors, and four days of essential literary conversation and celebration. The AWP Conference & Bookfair has always been a place of connection, reunion, and joy, and we are excited to see the writing community come together again in Kansas City, Missouri in 2024.
Postscript: Thank you to Kirsten Han and Alysha Chandra for inviting me to speak on the panel “The Uses if Storytelling” with playwright Alfian Sa’at and Kelly Leow, who co-produced the AWARE podcast saga at Singapore’s first ever Independent Media Fair. Thank you also to my publisher Jee Leong Koh of Gaudy Boy press for hosting the well-attended event. The fair was organized by Singapore Unbound, a New York City-based literary arts organization that promotes freedom of expression and equal rights, with Sydney-based literary magazine Mekong Review
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What is the role of storytelling in journalism? In what ways are art and propaganda the same or different? Please join us at the Projector X: Picturehouse for an author reading and discussion, titled ‘The Uses of Storytelling’, to be held from 4.30 – 6.00pm at the Singapore Independent Media Fair on 1 July 2023. Admission is free! Register here – https://lnkd.in/gYwgHZpJ
Remember that a free, independent media allows the public to make informed decisions, hold leaders accountable and hear a diversity of opinions free of corporate and government influence.
Brought to you by Mekong Review and Singapore Unbound
Event Details:
How is storytelling related to journalism and other media products? Is there any difference between art and propaganda? What kind of stories make the most impact on their readers/listeners?
Panelists: Alfian Sa’at (Playwright, Poet, and Writer), Kelly Leow (Co-Writer and Co-Producer, Saga, the AWARE Podcast), and Victor Fernando R. Ocampo (Speculative Fiction Author)
Join us on Thursday, 14 July 2022 at 07:30-9pm at the Crane Club, 281 Joo Chiat Road (Osprey Room).
Featuring: Laetitia Keok, myself and Monique Truong’s THE SWEETEST FRUITSEventbrite Tickets: $5.00 ($6.32 with taxes and fees)
An imprint of Singapore Unbound, Gaudy Boy publishes Asian authors from around the world. Our growing list includes such terrific writers as Monique Truong, Alfian Sa’at, Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, Victor Fernando R. Ocampo, Jhani Randhawa, Jenifer Sang Eun Park, and Tania De Rozario, among others. Our books have been reviewed in Publishers Weekly and Necessary Fiction; noted in The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, LitHub, Electric Literature, The Millions, Ms. Magazine, TimeOut, ArtsEquator, and Words Without Borders; and long- or shortlisted for The Believer, Lambda Literary, and Association for Asian American Studies awards. Come hear our authors and editors read from their work and talk about publishing with Gaudy Boy.
Victor Fernando R. Ocampo is the author of the International Rubery Book Award-shortlisted The Infinite Library and Other Stories (Math Paper Press, 2017 ; US edition: Gaudy Boy, 2021) and Here be Dragons (Canvas Press, 2015), which won the Romeo Forbes Children’s Story Award in 2012.
Laetitia Keok is a writer and editor from Singapore. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and published in Wildness Journal and Hobart Pulp, amongst others. She edits for Gaudy Boy and Sine Theta Magazine. You can find her at laetitia-k.com
With brilliant sensitivity and an unstinting eye, Monique Truong’s novel 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). Gaudy Boy’s edition comes with a new afterword by the author.
“Ocampo’s collection is simultaneously a meaningful addition to the genre of speculative fiction and a powerful manifesto laying out the possibilities of Southeast Asian literature.“
Thank you to Elise J. Choi, a copy editor based in Portland, Oregon who “reads science fiction, fantasy, and translated literature to her cat” for writing a great review of my collection, The Infinite Library and Other Stories (1st edition Math Paper Press, 2017; 2nd edition 2020; 3rd edition Gaudy Boy, 2021).
You can read the review at Necessary Fiction here.
“This is a reader’s book through and through, and the final story, a two-page ode to reading, confirms it. “To See Infinity in the Pages of a Book” provides a lovely cap for a work that has reveled in impossible libraries. Sometime in the future, a crack in spacetime reveals an astronaut literally “falling into a good book”:
Inside the singularity, the impossible astronaut is not dead, they are reading. Before they get to that last book they will ever read in their life, there is yet another book that needs to be read. Between that penultimate book and the one they hold in their hand, there is yet another book and another demanding attention. In fact, between the astronaut and Death, there is an endless series of books with no beginning and no end.
The scene is a literary imagining of a mathematical limit, in which a line stretches infinitely toward a value but never quite arrives. Usually it is the writer who achieves a kind of immortality. But Ocampo shifts that power by bestowing it upon his readers. The story closes with the optimistic declaration that “those who fall endlessly into books never die. They are forever reading.” – Elise J. Choi
Thank you so much to Jee Leong Koh and the rest of the #GaudyBoy LLC team (Kimberly, Judy, Isabel and Emily) for making the launch of The Infinite Library and Other Stories in New York City last 9 October 2021 possible! ICYMI Here’s a recording of the the event on YouTube –
Thank you also to the Pushcart-nominated writer and 2020 Felipe P. De Alba Fellow, Jemma Wei for hosting the event ,and to the wonderful Monique Truong, winner of the 2004 PEN/Robert Bingham Award, and best selling author of The Book of Salt, Bitter in the Mouth, and The Sweetest Fruits for judging the entries to Singapore Unbound‘s first flash fiction contest (the prompt of which was the title of my book). Congratulations to all the winners:
First prize: “A Room with a Point of View,” by Masturah Alatas (Italy).
Second prize: “This Is a Nice Hotel,” by Olivia Djawoto (Singapore).
Third Prize: “Devotion,” by Shuchi (Singapore).
Honorable Mention: “How Fucky Am I To Be Loved,” by Aaric Tan Xiang Yeow (Singapore).
Lastly, thank you to all who submitted entries and to all those who spent their Saturday evening with us!
The Infinite Library and Other Stories 