• May 2026

  Was Tojo Hideki the main villain?

  Sayaka Chatani

  Is Tojo Hideki a “Great Man” who single-handedly determined the course of history, or is he merely a character in a bigger story, a reflection of many crashing political and social forces?

• May 2026

  Writing back

  Bhuchung D. Sonam

  Packed with prose, poetry, stories, and reportage, Ocean, as Much as Rain is essential reading for all Tibetans and for anyone who wants to understand what it means to live under colonial occupation.

• May 2026

  Hold sway the water

  Dương Mạnh Hùng

  Rather than imposing a narrative or privileging the human perspective, Jeanne Penjan Lassus’s works attune to the rhythms, temporality, and micro-activities of a place—observing plants, animals, and environmental shifts with patience and openness.

• May 2026

  Singing in the open air

  Angela Sim

  In Singapore, Chinese street opera survives not through preservation alone; it also requires constant recreation and regeneration.

• May 2026

  When politics finds you

  Luna Ruomin Huang

  Even if you declare yourself politically apathetic, politics still has a way of seeking you out and banging on your door.

• May 2026

  Papa, are you okay?

  Alyssa Castillo Yap

  I strive to become someone breaking my back to harvest something better. A way to be home with my loved ones.

• May 2026

  Waiting it out

  Michael Pembroke

  China has resumed the role that it occupied for most of the last two millennia—until the nineteenth century—as the world’s dominant economic force.

• May 2026

  Goodness worth waiting for

  Max Loh

  DELAY: A Comics Anthology is a timely salve in an era where artists are facing an existential battle against artificial intelligence and digitisation.

• May 2026

  Glori’s Witness

  Sasti Gotama, translated from Indonesian by Awi Chin

  A short story by Sasti Gostama, translated from Indonesian by Awi Chin.

• May 2026

  Keeping secrets

  Michael D. Barr

  The publication of The Albatross File is very welcome for those with an interest in the Singapore story—though less for the hitherto secret documents it reproduces and more for the hitherto secret oral histories.

• May 2026

  Flooding the streets

  Lorence Lozano

  Arnold Is A Model Student shines a light on an unfair system, challenging the notion of what it means to be a “model” within such broken structures.

• May 2026

  Takeoff and landing

  Sean Gleeson

  Air India, in its heyday, commissioned Salvador Dalí to design an ashtray and paid him with an elephant. If the airline once embodied elite privilege, then its decline also represents the assertion of more normative market forces.

• May 2026

  Trauma burial

  Jamyang Phuntsok

  With Tibetan Sky, Ning Ken has written a novel that’s self-aware, complex, and genre-defying. It tackles a few myths about Tibet, while passing over some uncomfortable truths.

• May 2026

  Haircuts

  Varsha Sivaram

  In Singapore, queerness is considered an aberration—it jams up the works, causes panic and confusion. Numerous accounts of in-person discrimination support this, especially when it comes to hair.

• May 2026

  Waves of grace

  Lucell Larawan

  Casimiro Villas Jr lost everything in Super Typhoon Haiyan. Years later, he finds that family can be rebuilt not from blood, but from grace.

• May 2026

  Mynah offence

  Liv

  A short story by Liv.

• May 2026

  Saving the pantun

  Ken Kwek

  A copy of Koh Hoon Teck’s Panton Dondang Sayang Baba Baba Pranakan

• May 2026

  On chameleons

  Ryan J.M. Tan

  A poem by Ryan J.M. Tan

Free to read

• May 2026

  What is Asia?

  Isaac Neo

  Is the twenty-first century an Asian one? According to former Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan, this is entirely the wrong question to be asking.

• May 2026

  MamaInk and Wednesday Addams

  Taeyeon Song

  A trainee and the tattoo artists that she works with in a studio in Seoul reflect on craft, self-expression, and how upcoming changes in legislation will impact the evolution of both the culture and industry of tattooing in Korea.

• May 2026

  Writing back

  Bhuchung D. Sonam

  Packed with prose, poetry, stories, and reportage, Ocean, as Much as Rain is essential reading for all Tibetans and for anyone who wants to understand what it means to live under colonial occupation.

• May 2026

  Papa, are you okay?

  Alyssa Castillo Yap

  I strive to become someone breaking my back to harvest something better. A way to be home with my loved ones.

• May 2026

  Haircuts

  Varsha Sivaram

  In Singapore, queerness is considered an aberration—it jams up the works, causes panic and confusion. Numerous accounts of in-person discrimination support this, especially when it comes to hair.

• February 2026

  The Great Bangalore Road Show

  C.S. Bhagya

  A short comic by C.S. Bhagya on the lived realities of daily commuting in Bangalore.

• February 2026

  The unwanted election

  Aung Naing Soe

  The Myanmar military hopes that an election will give their rule a veneer of legitimacy, but a vote largely rejected by the people as a sham will hardly soothe tensions.