Dream Storeys
What if you could dream up any building you like? What would it be? How would constructing it change our lives?
A shopping mall self-destructs, and a single mother vanishes. A tree house for orphans and old folks is torn apart by an act of mercy. The Singapore Flyer is reinvented as a political prison. In this collection of nine tales, Clara Chow examines an alternative Singaporean landscape—one that exists only on paper—and the people we might be in it. A former newspaper correspondent, she interviews nine architects about chimeric structures and sets short stories in them. A hybrid of journalism and fiction, Dream Storeys documents the voices of urban visionaries, while taking their ideas into inventive, evocative new territories.
Architects featured
Yen Yen Wu • Chang Jiat-Hwee • Nirmal Kishnani • Lai Chee Kien • Michael Leong • Mark Wee • Olivia Tang • Joshua Comaroff • Tan Kok Hiang
Dream Storeys
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Reviews
“I don’t remember reading a crossgenre title like this, wonderfully traversing creative fiction, research and documentation without hitting a clunky, postmodernist note. Clara Chow’s agile blend of journalisticrigour and narrative empathy pays off handsomely. Rooted in reality and taking off into the heady realm of imagination, her stories are propelled by an urge to find a heart in the architecture of our lives, as characters navigate these dream structures, trying to find a human connection.” —Yeow Kai Chai, co-editor at Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and author of Pretend I'm Not Here
“We are accustomed to think of Singapore as a small island bound by a singular story. In Clara Chow’s genre-bending new book, it becomes a landscape of many dreams, in which architects’ fantasy projects provide a pretext for the revisions, reconstructions, and demolitions of counter-narratives.” —Professor Philip Holden, English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, and author of Heaven Has Eyes
“By mirroring real-life architectural dreams with a fictional narrative, Clara Chow has produced an intriguing and original literary structure. Her somewhat dystopian world is a discomforting vision of a future where people struggle to adapt to societies very different from today, yet are still guided by a deep sense of their own humanity and their connection to each other.” —Meira Chand, author of A Different Sky
“An inventive combination of non-fiction and fiction, with expertly crafted and unpredictable short stories. The exquisite and precise details in Clara Chow’s stories bring to life the fantastical structures dreamt of by her interviewees.” —Dave Chua, author of Gone Case
Fiction
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Singa-Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore
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Corridor: 12 Short Stories
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Collected Plays One
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Memorandum
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Hook and Eye: Stories from the Margins
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Collected Plays Two
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Giving Alms
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In This Desert, There Were Seeds
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Sampan
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Attunement
Is life hustling you out of tune? As the week roars by, we invite you to a slice of attunement penned lovingly by our authors, friends, and yours truly. Freshly delivered weekly with care. Intimacy guaranteed. Read selected letters below.
Magical, luminous things
Feb 19, 2022
I have flown across an ocean this week. This still sounds surreal to say.
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No negotiation for blood debt
Feb 14, 2022
The Burmese language resistance poetry is deeply embedded in the country’s colonial past. When mo...
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Burning holes in the darkness
Feb 7, 2022
Poets killed in broad daylight, writers tortured and maimed. I wonder if their ghosts watch on fr...
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