“…By the end of the evening, as we were walking back to the small flat she was renting across from Shimo- Kitazawa Station, it felt as though it had only been two weeks, rather than two years, since the last time we met. I knew there was something that I wanted to tell her, but I hesitated, and said nothing.

Last week I received an email from a friend, asking whether I could come back to Toronto for the funeral. Another stopover. 
Watching the conveyer belt carry its brightly coloured dishes round and round, I realized I still wasn’t sure what I had wanted to tell her. Now I would never know.”

— from Twenty-Four Flavours : Sushi
    Kaiten by Alex Mitchell


TWENTY-FOUR FLAVOURS : SUSHI

Twenty-Four Flavours is an anthology of 24 local writers, each contributing a piece of flash fiction, not more than 250 words. Twenty-Four Flavours will run for 24 issues, each issue food-themed

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(BUY!)

“Dear Fred Armisen,

How is it that mangos in jars are so uniform? Is it done by machine? Who cuts them? When I purchase the jarred and perfectly luscious slices, am I supporting some horrible sweatshop full of miserable mango fabricators, hunched over with fingers puckered and slippery with the mangos’ sweet nectar?

Susan


Dear Susan, I forwarded your letter to a mango jarrery in California. This is from the employees :

Dear Susan, we are writing to you from a horrible sweatshop. It is very sweaty in here. We are mango fabricators and it is horrible because it is full of us in here. We are hunched over with fingers puckered and slippery with the mangos’ sweet nectar. Please visit us. You can come in on one of our breaks. 10:15-10:30 am is the first one so do that one.

You should do it, Susan!
Fred.”

— from You’re a Horrible Person, But I Like You : The Believer Book of Advice

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THE BELIEVER BOOK OF ADVICE

+ You’re a Horrible Person, But I Like You
+ Care to Make Love in That Gross Little Space Between Cars ?

Gift Ideas for Christmas 2012 № 15 :

for the READER —

My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favourite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop
edited by Ronald Rice and Booksellers Across America

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When you think of your favourite bookstore, what comes to mind ? Is it the physical space ? Books stacked in rows and piled high, labeled with staff recommendations ? Do you think of the owner who knows each of her customers by name and can always press into your hands the perfect book that you’re sure to love ? Or is it the intangible thing that draws you there: the anticipation of a new discovery, or the feeling of community or of being at home ?

In My Bookstore 84 of our favourite writers put all of these thoughts and feelings into words in a one-of-a-kind collection that expresses their adoration and admiration for bookstores and booksellers all across the country.

“The safety regulations HDB issued, requiring metal windows to be double-grilled and locked, made a further virtue out of these HDB flats: Grandmother and Mother were custodians, keeping alive rural kindness and simplicity, two of many thousands strewn across our tiny, rapidly modernising country. The kampung did not die in soil; it dissipated, withered away in the sunlessness of modernity, the sharp grids of order mapped in the sky.”

— from Grandfather’s Aquaria by Gwee Li Sui (in Balik Kampung edited by Verena Tay)

“6513 miles of wall. 51 degrees high. 99 degrees wide. I listen to her voice though oceans of fortress and phoneline. I listen to her voice through cracks in the stone.

But the wall is not just distance alone:
The wall is her skin. The wall is her flesh. The wall is the cage of her ribs that play cavern to her leaky heart.

This heart that she has taken back to her kingdom on the other side of the receiver.

Her elusive heart. Her traitorous heart. The heart for which I will plunge my fists through delicately layered combinations of cement and tissue. The heart for which I will charge through boundaries of bone and brick, make myself tall like a giant, strong like lead, sure-footed as a cat with nothing to lose.

My lover is a wall.

My lover or longitude, lover of latitude, lover of meeting points made up be coordinates. Can you hear me from over there? I am back-stepping. Getting ready to run. I am gaining speed, rushing up against your fort, defying gravity, scaling your skin.

I will find you on the other side.”

― Tania De Rozario, My Jericho

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Part of GASPP, A gay anthology of Singapore poetry and prose edited by Ng Yi-Sheng, Dominic Chua, Irene Oh and Jasmine Seah

// BOOKSACTUALLY RECOMMENDS //

COAST

A mono-titular anthology of Singapore writing

“The word ‘coast’ has its origin in Latin: coasta, meaning ‘rib’ or ‘side’, is an exact aspect of body and so ties the coast anatomically to the body of a territory. Yet, the coast is as much sea as land too although this duality renders it not richer or denser but surprisingly thinner in both elemental qualities, being neither land nor sea enough. Here is every fertile terrain’s natural desert and wasteland, the space where main land finally discovers its edge, its finitude, while dreams of being elsewhere become suddenly tolerable…

… The anthology is nothing short of a manifesto, a call to stretch out the tent poles of language and go in search of an idiom for making destiny.”

Dr Gwee Li Sui

By Heart, 101 Poems to Remember
101 Sonnets
Sounds Good, 101 Poems to be Heard
The Funny Side, 101 Humorous Poems 

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Poetry Anthologies by Faber and Faber, now available at BooksActually!

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

The Thought-Fox
by Ted Hughes

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Part of Sounds Good, a poetry anthology of 101 Poems to be Heard

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.
Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.

A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:
They are round and flat and full of dark advice.

Cold worlds shake from the oar.
The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.
A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;

Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.

Crossing The Water
by Sylvia Plath

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Part of By Heart, a poetry anthology of 101 Poems to Remember