About this ebook
Being your best, most authentic self can be a somewhat grievous process. The winner of a beauty pageant bursts into flames the moment she is crowned. A man enters a dream and re-encounters a former lover in Pyongyang, North Korea. A gaggle of hipsters catches news of a secret Bon Iver concert playing somewhere on Dempsey Hill, only to risk the survival of their friendship.
Daryl Qilin Yam’s long-awaited first collection of short fiction combines magical realism, speculative autobiography and ekphrasis to weave illusory figures out of gung-ho millennials and the well-meaning mentor figures who fail them, and unveils the strange quests queer folk must embark on in order to keep a hold on love.
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About the author
Daryl Qilin Yam is a writer and editor of prose and poetry, born and based in Singapore. His novella, Shantih Shantih Shantih (2021), optioned for the screen by Fiction Shore, was shortlisted for the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize for Fiction and was subsequently awarded by popular vote the Readers’ Favourite English Book; it will be released in a new edition in 2025 by Epigram Books. The manuscript of his second novel, Lovelier, Lonelier (2021), received a National Arts Council Creation Grant in 2017, and became a finalist for the 2021 Epigram Books Fiction Prize; the published work was then nominated by the National Library Board for the 2023 International Dublin Literary Award. His first novel, Kappa Quartet (2016), was longlisted for the inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize and was released by Epigram Books in Singapore and the UK; it was selected by The Business Times as one of the best novels of 2016. His writing has also appeared in periodicals and publications such as Berlin Quarterly, Mekong Review, Sewanee Review, The Straits Times and the Best New Singaporean Short Stories anthology series.
