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Vinita Ramani's debut fiction collection is a kaleidoscopic jolt to the senses. A foreign talent barricades himself in his rented condo as he gradually loses his grip on reality. A wife explores a series of affairs in order to exert control over her sexual autonomy. A retiree descends into silence when he refuses to wear a hearing aid. An artist takes a road trip to unearth why the mores of her community have led to her sexually stunted adulthood. These stories unearth the truths often hidden by polite society.
“Provocative, urgently lyrical, vividly lucid and absolutely unforgettable, Vinita Ramani's debut collection transports us into subversive, sensual, previously unremarked spaces, both external and internal, with thrilling lapidary fierceness and an incisive intelligence that connects the Indian vedas with case briefings, and the longings of a Cambodian refugee with rapturous female desire. Every human tastes different, she writes, and she might well be describing her own method of illuminating the architecture and anxieties of Singapore while delving into the delirious and exquisite depths of being a woman so startlingly that normative narrative is forever disrupted. Ramani's prose blazes with a dazzling, erotic frankness and pulsating, cosmopolitan intelligence, making The Grand Arcade a triumph of the embodied imagination.”
—Dr Ravi Shankar, multi-award-winning author of Correctional
Vinita Ramani works at Mandai Wildlife Group, where she writes scripts and helps create programmes and presentations on wildlife, human-animal interactions and the biodiversity extinction crisis. She has held roles as a contributing editor at RICE Media and as a data journalist and editor at Kontinentalist, where she covered a broad array of topics including politics, race, identity and biodiversity conservation in Asia. Her film and music criticism has appeared in BigO (Singapore), Criticine (Philippines), Kino! (Slovenia), Exclaim! (Canada) and Raj Palta (Canada); her writing has also been published in Portside Review, Kyoto Journal, POSKOD, Esquire (Singapore), Philippine Daily Inquirer, The Straits Times and The Margins, among many other publications. She was a founding editor of the National Museum of Singapore’s Cinematheque Quarterly, as well as a recipient of an Arts Creation Fund grant from the National Arts Council. Her graphic memoir, Bearing Witness (with Griselda Gabriele), was released in 2022 by Difference Engine. Vinita was born in India, then at an early age relocated to Bahrain, the UK and Hong Kong, before migrating to Singapore, where she currently lives with her family.

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The Grand Arcade