This morning I was at The Arts House again, this time at Earshot cafe for the launch of Wena Poon’s The Proper Care of Foxes, her latest collection of short stories. I was joined by Sarah.
The Proper Care of Foxes has been out in stores for a bit now, but today was like the official launch with Wena and her publisher, Ethos Books. Ethos might be a familiar name, because they’re quite well known for publishing local poetry.
There wasn’t much of a crowd, but intimate book launches are always nice. Wena read from the story Justin & the Cenotaph, which was actually quite funny in some bits. One of the characters totally sounds like someone I know, which was interesting to say the least.
After the reading, there was a short dialogue with her publisher from Ethos. I wasn’t able to catch his name, so if you know it please let me know and I’ll add it on.
It was interesting to hear from a local publisher about what they wanted. Ethos is looking to publish more full-length novels in the genre of literary fiction, so if you have a manuscript it might be worth it to approach them. The discussion ranged from a recent encounter with a cab driver that inspired Wena to what Singapore publishers look for in the work that is submitted to them.
Afterwards we kind of hung about for a while; we managed to speak to Wena for a bit about Biophilia before she had to go another panel.
I’m looking forward to reading more of Wena’s work. She’s got a unique voice among Singaporean writers and can be genuinely funny, even though I’m generally not a fan of diaspora as a genre.