--Selected by The Straits Times as a Classic Singapore Play in 2014-- The swinging 1960s. A nightclub in Singapore. A one night stand that turns into true love. Or not? In Mimi Fan, Singapore playwright Lim Chor Pee weaves together a haunting tale about love, escapism and broken hearts searching for healing. Through the story of a teenage bar girl, Mimi Fan, whose destiny clashes with Chan Fei-Loong, an English-educated overseas Singaporean who has returned home to work, Lim brings to the fore some undeniable and searing truths: true love requires courage, it can be painful, and it can haunt you, despite your best efforts to ignore it. Written by Singapore’s pioneer playwright Lim Chor Pee in 1962, Mimi Fan is considered Singapore’s first English-language play written by a local. It was first staged by the Experimental Theatre Club in 1962 and then restaged by Theatreworks in 1990.

He was originally an ordinary orphan, but his stealth skill, "God", was activated by a lightning strike. He could hide himself to hug beauties and assassinate his enemies in the dark! Beautiful ladies, status is easy to obtain! He was a tyrannical king who roamed the world with his arms around the city!

Many users of the Internet are aware of bots: automated programs that work behind the scenes to come up with search suggestions, check the weather, filter emails, or clean up Wikipedia entries. More recently, a new software robot has been making its presence felt in social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter – the socialbot. However, unlike other bots, socialbots are built to appear human. While a weatherbot will tell you if it's sunny and a spambot will incessantly peddle Viagra, socialbots will ask you questions, have conversations, like your posts, retweet you, and become your friend. All the while, if they're well-programmed, you won't know that you're tweeting and friending with a robot. Who benefits from the use of software robots? Who loses? Does a bot deserve rights? Who pulls the strings of these bots? Who has the right to know what about them? What does it mean to be intelligent? What does it mean to be a friend? Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality is one of the first academic collections to critically consider the socialbot and tackle these pressing questions.

Filled with humor, romance, mystery, suspense, and the Lord's grace, this sassy novel follows the lives of four pastors' wives as they try to deal with pressures and lean on each other.

Fall in love with Singapore’s most prominent feminist playwright. Ovidia Yu dissects all things female—from breasts to virginity, motherhood to lesbian love—and lays them bare in this omnibus collection of her finest works, including The Woman in a Tree on the Hill, the only Singapore play to win the Edinburgh Fringe First award.

Denationalizing Identities explores the relationship between performance and ideology in the global Sinosphere. Wah Guan Lim's study of four important diasporic director-playwrights—Gao Xingjian, Stan Lai Sheng-chuan, Danny Yung Ning Tsun, and Kuo Pao Kun—shows the impact of theater on ideas of "Chineseness" across China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. At the height of the Cold War, the "Bamboo Curtain" divided the "two Chinas" across the Taiwan Strait. Meanwhile, Hong Kong prepared for its handover to the People's Republic of China and Singapore rethought Chinese education. As geopolitical tensions imposed ethno-nationalist identities across the region, these four dramatists wove together local, foreign, and Chinese elements in their art, challenging mainland China's narrative of an inevitable communist outcome. By performing cultural identities alternative to the ones sanctioned by their own states, they debunked notions of a unified Chineseness. Denationalizing Identities highlights the key role theater and performance played in circulating people and ideas across the Chinese-speaking world, well before cross-strait relations began to thaw.

On the cusp of independence, cultures collide in a bedroom in Singapore. As the Vietnam War rages on, the English-educated scholar Lee Hua Min—“the finest product of the University”—finds himself hopelessly disillusioned. Enter Wong Ching Mei, a Chinese-educated former nightclub singer seeking to enrol in Nanyang University. Mirroring the intense tussles between the English- and Chinese-speaking during Singapore’s formative years, Hua Min and Ching Mei trade ferocious barbs even as they are inexplicably drawn to each other. When Su-Ling, Hua Min’s ex-classmate, returns from London, Hua Min is torn between their advances and the extremely different worlds they inhabit. Humorous, witty and prescient, A White Rose At Midnight is a pithy portrait of a soul—and nation—divided. A White Rose At Midnight was first staged to critical acclaim by the Experimental Theatre Club in 1964. It was pioneer playwright Lim Chor Pee’s second and final play after the landmark Mimi Fan (1962). In 2014, Centre 42 mounted a partial dramatised reading of the play.

Since the nation-state sprang into being in 1965, Singapore literature in English has blossomed energetically, and yet there have been few books focusing on contextualizing and analyzing Singapore literature despite the increasing international attention garnered by Singaporean writers. This volume brings Anglophone Singapore literature to a wider global audience for the first time, embedding it more closely within literary developments worldwide. Drawing upon postcolonial studies, Singapore studies, and critical discussions in transnationalism and globalization, essays unearth and introduce neglected writers, cast new light on established writers, and examine texts in relation to their specific Singaporean local-historical contexts while also engaging with contemporary issues in Singapore society. Singaporean writers are producing work informed by debates and trends in queer studies, feminism, multiculturalism and social justice -- work which urgently calls for scholarly engagement. This groundbreaking collection of essays aims to set new directions for further scholarship in this exciting and various body of writing from a place that, despite being just a small ‘red dot’ on the global map, has much to say to scholars and students worldwide interested in issues of nationalism, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, neoliberalism, immigration, urban space, as well as literary form and content. This book brings Singapore literature and literary criticism into greater global legibility and charts pathways for future developments.

Those Who Can’t, Teach turns the spotlight on the madcap lives of teachers and students in a typical secondary school in Singapore. As the teachers struggle daily to nurture and groom, the students prefer to hang out and “chillax”. With upskirting and Facebooking, griping and politicking, school takes on a whole new meaning as the colourful characters struggle to prove that those who can, teach. Written by Singapore’s most prolific playwright Haresh Sharma, Those Who Can’t, Teach was first staged by The Necessary Stage in 1990 to critical acclaim. Twenty years later, Sharma revisits this classic to revitalise it for the Singapore Arts Festival 2010, transforming it into a powerful portrayal of the pressures and challenges facing teachers (and students) in schools in the 21st century.

This volume featrues over 250,000 words and more than 125 photographs identifying and defining theatre in more than 30 countries from India to Uzbekistan, from Thailand to New Zealand and featuring extensive documentation on contemporary Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Australian theatre.