Constancy

Dear Reader,

The fixtures in life we depend on often recede from our attention.

As we attend to our daily chores, we experience the brightness of natural or electric light. If you were like me this morning, you wouldn’t be actively conscious of the sun in the sky. But there it was. Radiant.
…
Gravitate towards fixity and stability when there’s too much of a tilt towards uncertainty and loss. Desire newness when tedium sets in.
…
Ethos Books has reached a point in our publishing lifecycle where we now need to curate for constancy as well as newness. When publishing contracts near expiry, our editorial team and I have then to consider the titles to bid farewell to, and the titles to reissue.

2025 is the first year that our team will be birthing reissues with the authors and editors of established Ethos titles. One discovery we made: making reissues is not always as straightforward as imagined—after all, the author or editor is no longer the same person they were when the book was first published, and the work will need to be renegotiated.

The books we are reissuing in 2025 include:

Little Things, the poetry anthology edited by Angelia Poon, Loh Chin Ee and Esther Vincent Xueming. Since its release in 2013, Little Things has passed into the hands of many readers. This book has done its utmost to sustain poetry and passionate literature teachers in secondary schools.

The Sound of SCH, Danielle Lim’s elegiac story drawing on her uncle’s real-life struggle with mental illness, which has contributed to our society’s journey towards greater awareness of and sensitivity to mental wellness. The Sound of SCH was awarded the Singapore Literature Prize for Non-Fiction in 2016.

Three other Ethos reissues were formerly with other publishers: Kampong Spirit—Gotong Royong by Josephine Chia, Ministry of Moral Panic by Amanda Lee Koe and What Give Us Our Names by Alvin Pang. Awards and sales figures aside, each is an idiosyncratically distinctive work.

What we wish to do with each reissue is to create a publishing lodestone to stand the test of time. This can only happen if a title continues to circulate. Reissuing selected works on a periodic basis resurfaces them to attention, so we become aware of the light they have been shining.

Ethos Books has also started acquiring titles to shape our catalogue in intentional directions. The publication of Amanda Lee Koe’s Sister Snake creates a pathway for Singapore authors published by American and British houses to return home in hyperlocal style—Amanda worked intimately with Tororo.aoi to fashion the cover for the Singapore-only edition. Hai Fan’s Delicious Hunger, translated from Chinese into English by Jeremy Tiang, was first published by fellow independent Tilted Axis. Acquiring this work for Southeast Asia publication will enable Ethos to further the excellent work of Hai Fan, Jeremy and Tilted Axis. It also signals our aim to bring in translations, so as to develop a Southeast Asia ecology.

What of newness then? Our team is eager to bring to you Walid Jumblatt Abdullah’s Why Palestine? (March; non-fiction), nor’s homesick (June; poetry) and Shivram Gopinath’s Dey (November; spoken word).

And as always, newness depends on the ingenuities and passions of our authors and editors.

Kah Gay

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