How do we find the books we must read if we don't even know they exist? Consider the play Boom by Jean Tay or classic Singaporean novels The Immolation by Goh Poh Seng and Glass Cathedral by Andrew Koh. These are all extraordinary reads that found me this spring because I happened to write a column about Booksactually, an indie bookseller in Singapore.
Shortly thereafter, Felicia Low, rights and marketing manager for Epigram Books, contacted me. "Like Books Actually, we are a local entity, often struggling against the grain to get literary titles published when so many out there are waiting for the next big celebrity biography," she wrote.
Epigram publishes fiction, plays, poetry and children's books (including Adeline Foo's popular Diary of Amos Lee series), and, its website notes, "as we are a Singapore publishing house, we also reflect our nation's mad obsession with food by publishing both recipe and food guides." This year Epigram also started the Wee Editions imprint to support Singapore designers, photographers and artists through a series of compact coffee table books.
Felicia and I exchanged a few e-mails. Some books eventually arrived at my office. I started reading them. That's how this ceremony begins, and now yet another vista in our larger-than-we-imagine-it-is book world has opened before me.
I liked the books I read so much that my curiosity was sparked regarding their source. Who better to ask than Edmund Wee, CEO and publisher of Epigram Books? 
"Like most countries, the big book publishers in Singapore publish textbooks, educational and academic books," he observed. "Literary titles form only a small percentage of their total output. It is the independent publishers who take on the literary slack. The demand for novels and short stories is admittedly weak because of their less-than-sparkling quality. But it has to start somewhere. (In fact, in the late '60s and early '70s, there was the stirring of a literary movement. But in the rush for nation building, it was sidetracked and never really recovered.) Epigram Books believes it can be put back on track and needs to."
In addition to Singapore, Epigram sells books in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Dubai in their original editions. Wee said that Hachette India "bought the country rights for the Indian sub-continent for our Diary of Amos Lee titles. The translation rights for the Amos Lee series have also been sold to Indonesia and Mainland China. Before the sale to China (for 10,000 copies each for the first three Amos Lee titles), the best market outside Singapore was India. After our recent trip to Bologna, we have had interest from publishers in France, Canada, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Japan for our Amos Lee and Archibald titles."
Epigram's new Singapore distributor will take orders from bookshops in Malaysia, Brunei, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and Vietnam. "We are in the process of finding distributors for other countries," Wee noted. "Meanwhile, we have outsourced our sales of foreign rights to a newly established literary agency based in France called Hen&ink."
Distribution is just one of the innumerable challenges indie publishers face all over the world. According to Wee, "Many of the independent publishers I have met from countries in Africa, the Middle East, South and Central America, eastern Europe and Asia face the same problem of having limited financing, reluctant external distributors and non-existent marketing budgets."
Other obstacles include "practically everything imaginable from start to end. It's difficult persuading established writers (including their out-of-print titles) to switch; it's hard finding experienced editors; it's costly (per unit) printing such small volumes; and it's tiresome having to keep accounts. But we know these challenges are only temporary. In a few years, we are confident of establishing ourselves and look to publishing the Great Singapore Novels."
Why does he do it? What's the reward? "When we uncover a gem of a novel and when we see our books become bestsellers. Ultimately, it is to develop a rich literary culture," Wee observed. "You will never truly know a country through its news reports but through its novels. Apart from the occasional in-depth feature, nearly all news coverage is superficial.
"For example, I would never have known about the link between the CIA and ISI if not for David Ignatius's Bloodmoney or of the straight-edge underground music scene in New York if not for Eleanor Henderson's Ten Thousand Saints or the social and ethnic conflicts in contemporary Los Angeles if not for Hector Tobar's The Barbarian Nurseries.
"Outside of the U.S., two recent novels by Pakistani and Ethiopian writers have given me an insight into the countries they wrote about. Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders gave a penetrating account of life among the servants and children of a landlord in Pakistan. Similarly, Sulaiman Addonia's The Consequences of Love opened my eyes to understanding how Saudi Arabia works."
Sometimes the books we must read find us, if we're paying attention.--Published by Shelf Awareness, issue #1742.
photo: Nicholas Leong
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All fiction readers can easily--perhaps too easily--come up with a list of their favorite bad mother characters. There are hundreds of them on our bookshelves, dating back to ancient Greece. 
My own choice was easier this year. Since my mother is allergic to flowers and chocolate, I opted for an e-reader (don't tell her!) because of the adjustable type sizes. My choice is apparently on the crest of a new, post-Hallmark mom tech-wave. The Harris survey discovered that technology is gaining serious ground on flora in the Mother's Day gift race, with 30% of women saying they'd prefer a smartphone or tablet.
Free Comic Book Day always makes me smile. I don't know why. Well, sure I do. Nostalgia plays a role, since I inherited my first stack of comics when I was about 11 from a kid who was a few years older. He was also smaller, despite the fact that his nickname was Moose. 
Forbes magazine noted that free comics are a revenue generator. "I'm told by a lot of retailers, and I'll bear that out in my own store, that Free Comic Book Day is one of the best days of the year in terms of business," said Joe Field, FCBD's founder and the owner of Flying Colors Comics, Concord, Calif. "We use Free Comic Book Day as a way to just get people ignited about comics... and to come back to the store week after week. It turns out, with the number of people who show up, it's no secret that it's become one of the best business days of the year."
Let me introduce you to my rattiest book: Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, a Modern Library edition I bought new one summer during my college years--probably in 1969 or 1970. At the time, Thoreau mattered more to me than almost anyone, living or dead. I made pilgrimages to Concord, visited Walden Pond and tried to ignore the beachgoers; left a pebble at his grave in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. I carried Walden in my Army surplus knapsack every day then, opened it constantly like a holy book, and over a relatively brief period of time beat it to within an inch of its biblio-life. 
Now I open my copy of Walden to the same bookmarked page and wonder when I first put that marker there and why. I read a few lines: "I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." I liked to underline passages then. Here more of the page is highlighted than not. Guess I grew more selective over the years.
She also recommended extending an invitation to the U.S. poet laureate (currently Philip Levine), who "would be a natural choice, and the recent ones (Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, Kay Ryan come immediately to mind) have done so much to encourage wider readerships with annotated anthologies and other programs. It would be great to have our nation's top poet say hello to us all in verse, and I am sure publishers would be behind this. In particular I fantasize the audience to be one of the large gatherings, where the topic may not be poetry, but the poet can start the event... like an invocation of sorts."
If New York is the city where poetry never sleeps, an official BEA poet-in-residence might just lend an air of, well, poetic justice to the show after all these years. 
"Melancholic" is an apt description of my feelings when I learned about Tabucchi's recent death at 68. After reading the obituaries, I pulled his books from my shelves and flipped through them, searching for underlined passages, the only direct connection I could imagine; a reader's way of mourning. 
"I don't really remember why I picked up Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows--maybe I had heard him sing--but I was completely captivated," recalled my colleague Marilyn Dahl, book review editor at Shelf Awareness. "The poetry spoke to me viscerally, especially at a time in my life when everything was drama and angst and joy and sorrow--you know, a time when no one understands you except a poet. And now, later in life, these lines still ring true: 'and things that might have been/ if I'd had wiser eyes.' So the first time I went to San Francisco, I walked to Stanyan Street on a pilgrimage. Even now, when I am in SF on the way to my sister-in-law's and cross Stanyan Street, I feel the magic of McKuen's poetry and connection. I want to stop and walk that street again."
Cheryl Krocker McKeon of Rakestraw Books, Danville, Calif., observed: "Your essay today resonated, as I recall my Ohio State education prof, the quarter I was due to graduate, disagreeing with my interpretation of a poem and saying the fateful words, 'I feel sorry for any student in your class.' I eventually overcame her criticism, but continued to enjoy poetry, including Rod McKuen." 
The enthusiastic and "real-time" electronic call and response struck me as deliciously ironic, given her censure of the "Fast" entertainment we are subjected to on "the screens that blare in every corner of America (at the airport, at the gym, in the elevator, in our hands)." 
For a long time now, I have juggled several books at once--good books and bad books; print books, e-books and audiobooks--while ever casting a covetous gaze toward other tempting titles within reach on shelves and online. There have been far too many one-night-reads, when I scanned 50 pages and bailed. 
What intrigues me about Karnad's damnation of fake bibliophilia is his assumption that the roles of reader and "bookser" are mutually exclusive; that booksing is an inevitable sign of the bibliocalypse. As an old reader and bookser, I must disagree.
Peter Golden's story could be framed as an ongoing comeback that just keeps getting better. His novel Comeback Love, about a couple exploring the possibility of a second chance at love 35 years after their relationship ended during the turbulent 1960s, will be published April 3 by Washington Square Press/Atria, but its comeback really began more than two years ago as the first novel released by Staff Picks Press, a small publishing house started by bookseller Susan Novotny, owner of Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y., and Market Block Books, Troy. 
Golden recalled that Novotny "was certainly diligent when it came to spreading the word about Comeback Love. More than anyone she brought the novel to the attention of publishers. And I might not have met my agent, Susan Golomb, and my editor, Greer Hendricks, both of whom have been enormously helpful."