Books

• Patrick Modiano, Sleep of Memory, translated by Mark Polizzotti
• Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
• Othman Wok, Malayan Horror: Macabre Tales of Singapore and Malaysia in the 50’s, trans. Tuminah Sapawi & M. M. Basalamah
• Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order
• Patrick Modiano, The Black Notebook, trans. Mark Polizzotti
• Patrick Modiano, The Night Watch, trans. Patricia Wolf & Frank Wynne
• Gabriel García Márquez, Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín, trans. Asa Zatz
• Charles Willeford, Pick-up
• Patrick Modiano, Ring Roads, tras. Caroline Hillier & Frank Wynne
• James Fenton, Selected Poems
• Patrick Modiano, Missing Person, trans. Daniel Weissbort
• Keith Gessen, A Terrible Country
• Matt Ruff, Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy
• José Saramago, Small Memories, trans. Margaret Jull Costa
• Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading
• Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar
• Wallace Stevens, Parts of a World
• Wallace Stevens, Transport to Summer
• Patrick Modiano, Pedigree, trans. Mark Polizzotti
• Langston Hughes, The Big Sea

Films

• Roma, directed by Alfonso Cuarón
• Brainstorm, dir. Douglas Trumbull

Exhibits

• “Jef Geys: Quadra Medicinale Singapore,” NTU CCA
• “Izat Arif: Semangat Kejiranan / everybody loves good neighbours,” NTU CCA
• “Buddhist Archive of Photography/Amy Lien/Enzo Camacho: And in the Chapel and in the Temples,” NTU CCA
• “Michelangelo Pistoletto: The Third Paradise – Between Observe and Reverse,” Partners + Mucciaccia
• “Women’s Work: Contemporary Art from Asia and the Middle East,” Sundaram Tagore
• “Hopes & Dialogues in Rumah Kijang,” Mizuma Gallery
• “Cheng Ran: The Lament: Mountain Ghost,” Ota Fine Arts
• “Boedi Widjaja: Rivers and Lakes / Tanah dan Air,” Shanghart Gallery
• “Frictional: Ben Loong & Zulkifli Lee,” Pearl Lam Galleries

Books

• Francis M. Naumann, Mentors: The Making of an Art Historian
• Gabriel García Márquez, News of a Kidnapping, translated by Edith Grossman
• Michael D. Gordin, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe
• Dashiell Hammett, The Glass Key
• Patrick Modiano, La Place de l’Étoile, trans. Caroline Hillier
• Samanta Schweblin, Fever Dream, trans. Megan McDowell
• Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties
• Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
• Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man
• Cyril Wong, After You
• Cyril Wong, Oneiros
• Herman Melville, Typee
• Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case
• Jason Wee, An Epic of Durable Departures
• Ross Macdonald, The Ferguson Affair
• Ross Macdonald, Blue City

Movies

• Silent Running, directed by Douglas Trumbull

Books

• James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
• Lynne Murphy, The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English
• Javier Cercas, The Impostor: A True Story, translated by Frank Wynne
• Robert Sheckley, Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley
• Gabriel García Márquez, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, trans. Randolph Hogan
• Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, trans. Edith Grossman
• Thorkild Hansen, Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761–1767, trans. James McFarlane & Kathleen McFarlane
• Julie J. Thomson, ed., That Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson
• Tiziano Terzani, A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East
• Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

Films

• Shirkers, directed by Sandi Tan

Books

• Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl
• Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
• Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus, translated by Klara Glowczewska
• Domenico Starnone, Trick, trans. Jhumpa Lahiri
• Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus
• Claudia Rankine, The End of the Alphabet
• Nigel Barley, Island of Demons
• Malcolm X & Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Films

• Doubles vies (Non-Fiction), directed by Olivier Assayas
• Nuestro tiempo (Our Time), dir. Carlos Reygadas
• The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

Books

• Filippo-Tommaso Marinetti, Mafarka the Futurist, translated by Carol Diethe & Steve Cox
• Domenico Starnone, Ties, trans. Jhumpa Lahiri
• Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues, trans. Dick Davis
• Dag Solstad, Professor Anderson’s Night, trans. Agnes Scott Langeland
• Amir D. Aczel, The Jesuit & the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man
• R. O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

Films

• Sorry to Bother You, directed by Boots Riley
• The Hudsucker Proxy, dir. Joel Coen
• The Big Lebowski, dir. Joel Coen
• Le Livre d’image (The Image Book), dir. Jean-Luc Godard

Books

• Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon
• Helen DeWitt, Some Trick
• Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver
• Cesare Pavese, The Leather Jacket, trans. Alma Murch
• Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere
• Pascal Quignard, A Terrace in Rome, trans. Douglas Penick & Charles Ré

Books

• Sandro Veronesi, Quiet Chaos, translated by Michael F. Moore
• Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard, trans. Archibald Colquhoun
• Rain Chudori, Imaginary City: A Guide Book

I’ve been reading a fair amount of contemporary southeast Asian literature – this Indonesian novel picked up at random at the Ubud literary festival – and I’m not sure what to make of a lot of it, other than I can’t find a way in. This one is more formally interesting than most I’ve read: one lover takes another through her personal version of Jakarta, starting from the form of a travel guide, with photographs and full-page pullquotes. There’s a pull-out map detailing the locations described. With this, as with a lot of regional contemporary art and writing, there’s a twee quality that I can’t really do anything with: everything is attractive, but with no edge at all. The lovers sigh about the necessary end of their romance, but there’s no visible conflict. The end effect is something like a spread in Kinfolk: perhaps attractive, certainly with high production values, but not art in any way that I can understand.

• Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone, trans. Susan Bernofsky
• Imogen Hermes Gowar, The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock
• Hwang Jungeun, One Hundred Shadows, trans. Jung Yewon
• Roland Schimmelpfennig, One Clear, Ice-Cold January Morning at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century, trans. Jamie Bulloch

Films

• Sons of the Desert, directed by William A. Seiter
• Way Out West, dir. James W. Horne
• The Big Noise, dir. Mal St.Clair
• The Nutty Professor, dir. Jerry Lewis
• The Flying Deuces, dir. ‎A. Edward Sutherland 

Exhibits

• Museum Pasifika, Nusa Dua, Indonesia
• Art Bali 2018, Nusa Dua, Indonesia
• Neka Museum, Ubud, Indonesia

Books

• Yoko Tawada, The Last Children of Tokyo, translated by Margaret Mitsutani
• David B., Black Paths, trans. Nora Mahony
• Joshua Mattson, A Short Film about Disappointment
• Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War
• Italo Svevo, A Perfect Hoax, trans. J. G. Nichols
• Umberto Saba, Ernesto, trans. Mark Thompson
• Eve Babitz, Sex & Rage
• Luis Francia, The Beauty of Ghosts: Five Voices: A Theater of Poetry

Films

• Senso, directed by Luchino Visconti

Books

• Elsa Morante, The World Saved by Kids and Other Epics, translated by Cristina Viti
• Giovanni Verga, Little Novels of Sicily, trans. D. H. Lawrence
• Sergio de la Pava, Lost Empress
• Fleur Jaeggy, I Am the Brother of XX, trans. Gini Alhadeff 
• Violette Leduc, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur, trans. Derek Coltman
• Cesare Pavese, _The Beautiful Summer, trans. W. J. Strachan
• Cesare Pavese, The Beach, trans. R. W. Flint
• Goh Poh Seng, Tall Tales and Misadventures of a Young Westernized Oriental Gentleman
• Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends
• Sally Rooney, Normal People
• Lydia Millet, Fight No More
• Cesare Pavese, Among Women Only, trans. R. W. Flint
• Charles Bernstein, Republics of Reality 1975–1995
• Lily Tuck, Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante
• Charles Williams, The Greater Trumps

Films

• WUSA, directed by Stuart Rosenberg

Exhibits

• “Wei Leng Tay: Crossings,” NUS Museum
• “Of Place and A Paradox,” NUS Museum
• “Yeo Shih Yun: Diaries, Marking Time And Other Preoccupations,” NUS Museum
• “Chow and Lin: Homeless,” NUS Museum

Books

• Jean-Patrick Manchette, The Prone Gunman, translated by James Brook
• George S. Schuyler, Black No More
• Eka Kurniawan, Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, trans. Annie Tucker
• Edoardo Nesi, Infinite Summer, trans. Alice Kilgarriff
• Natalia Ginzburg, The Manzoni Family, trans. Marie Evans
• Joseph Roth, Hotel Savoy, trans. Jonathan Katz
• Karel Čapek, War with the Newts, trans. M. & R. Weatherall
• Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed, trans. Bruce Penman
• Giovanni Verga, The House by the Medlar Tree, trans. Eric Mosbacher
• Luigi Pirandello, Each in His Own Way, trans. Arthur Livingston

Films

• 버닝 (Burning), directed by Lee Chang-dong
• Trouble in Paradise, dir. Ernst Lubitsch
• La terra trema, dir. Luchino Visconti

Exhibits

• “APB Foundation Signature Art Prize 2018,” Singapore Art Museum
• “Gilles Massot: The Probability of Veracity Part 2: The Reenactments (from analogue to digital),” Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film
• “Darren Soh: Before It All Goes: Architecture from Singapore’s Early Independence Years,” Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film
• “Intriguing Uncertainties,’ Parkview Museum