Alfian Sa’at’s The Asian Boys Trilogy is a fascinating, insightful tour through the lives and loves of the gay community in Singapore. In the campy and carnivalesque Dreamplay, history is turned upside-down as a goddess travels through time to ‘save gay men from themselves’. In Landmarks, geography takes centrestage, as eight short plays explore the spaces that have been claimed, colonised, and trespassed by those at the margins of the mainstream. In Happy Endings, the playwright’s adaptation of the novel Peculiar Chris evolves into a meditation on the relationship between life and literature. With clear-eyed compassion and eloquent outrage, this collection of plays charts the coming-of-age of a community finding its voice.

Malay Sketches is a collection of stories that borrows its name from a book of anecdotes by colonial governor Frank Swettenham, describing Malay life on the Peninsula. In Alfian Sa’at’s hands, these sketches are reimagined as flash fictions that record the lives of members of the Malay community in Singapore. With precise and incisive prose, Malay Sketches offers the reader profound insights into the realities of life as an ethnic minority. Longlisted for the 2013 Frank O'connor International Short Story Award

Corridor is a collection of short stories all set in present-day Singapore. With unsentimental clarity and heartbreaking honesty, Alfian Sa’at writes about HDB dwellers – students, housewives and factory workers, whose lives begin to unravel once they discover that happiness is a fragile thing in a country obsessed with progress and success. The characters in each story find themselves in situations that offer them a ticket to hope and change: A video camera transforms the way a resentful daughter sees her widowed mother. A married couple receives free holiday tickets just when their luck seems to have run out. A girl encounters a transvestite on an MRT train ride who tells her that she looks like a famous singer. And a man enters a discotheque after a bitter divorce and re-learns the terror of falling in love all over again. Rich in authentic detail, with a sensitive ear for the vernacular, Corridor paints an elegiac, revealing portrait of contemporary Singaporeans who exist along the city’s corridors – haunted by lost loves, irrevocable childhoods and a deep longing to be free. Corridor won the Singapore Literature Prize Commendation Award in 1998. “Alfian’s stories are significant as they articulate with a critical eye the concerns of minorities, groups that do not or cannot fit the societal norms.” – Paul Tan, The Straits Times “His poet’s eye for freeze framing moments and his command of the language are still very much in evidence in the elegant turns of phrase and the flashes of poetic insight.” – Ong Sor Fern, The Straits Times "The magic of Alfian’s writing is no sleight of hand. It’s no illusion. It’s real.” – Haresh Sharma, playwright of Off Centre

Straits Times Life! Theatre Awards 2012 nominee for: Production of the Year, Best Original Script, Best Director, Best Ensemble In the electrifying months leading up to the watershed 2011 General Elections and in the tumultuous months after, playwright Alfian Sa’at interviewed Singaporeans to discover their responses to the elections. Covering a wide social and political spectrum, the candid interviews capture the GE experience through the voices of individual Singaporeans — from election candidates to pro-establishment civil servants; from taxi-drivers to teachers; from diehard opposition supporters to young people casting their virgin votes. These interviews — some hopeful, some fearful, some hilariously frank, some achingly honest — form a portrait of Singaporeans confronting the real meaning of democracy and rediscovering their role in shaping the country’s future. Cooling-Off Day is published by Ethos Books & W!LD RICE. Reader Reviews "Heartfelt and hilarious...no issue too taboo to be discussed." — The Flying Inkpot "A must-see...you will recognise yourself in it." — The Straits Times "Asthma inducing hilarity." — TODAY “Highly entertaining.” — Channelnewsasia.com “Brilliant...I was tempted to lead a standing ovation at the end of it.” — The Online Citizen

One Fierce Hour is Alfian Sa’at’s first and breakout work. It was hailed as ‘truly a landmark’ for Singaporean poetry when it was published in 1998 when the poet was just 21 years old. Since, then it has been kept in print and has entered the list of canonical anthologies of Singapore literature. The collection contains the anti-anthem “Singapore You Are Not My Country” written well before social media gave voice to dissent and different views of Singapore. Alfian remains an intelligent writer with an unabashedly social and political voice. He has written 37 plays, 3 works of prose and 2 poetry anthologies.

From a future of electronic doas and AI psychotherapists, sense-activated communion with forests and a portal to realms undersea, to a reimagined origin and afterlife—editor and translator Nazry Bahrawi brings together an exciting selection of never-before translated and new Malay spec-fic stories by established and emerging writers from Singapore. Especially in an anglophone-dominated genre, very little of Malay speculative fiction from Singapore is known to readers here and beyond. Yet contemporary Bahasa literature here is steeped in spec-fic writing that can account as a literary movement (aliran)—and unmistakably draws from the minority Malay experience in a city obsessed with progress.

Unapologetic, unafraid and unyielding, Alfian’s second collection of verse delves in greater depth the concerns in his first volume and moves into reclaiming our collective history and memory. In mining our psyche, he casts light where whispers and shadows lurk. He draws inspiration from censored histories, subsumed myths and invokes imagined voices from the exiled, demanding of the reader to witness the ubiquitous ideological fictions that surround us. This is one of the most dissonant and penetrating voices in Singapore poetry. • A History of Amnesia is listed in the notable books list by the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Award (administered by University of San Francisco). • A History of Amnesia is also shortlisted for Singapore Literature Prize in 2004.