The Inventors

“Mediocre curry; a re-gifted book languishing in a second-hand bookstore; stolen orchids; a procession of fictional diseases. Li makes an alluring, haunting book out of such “mismatched moments”, out of the ways we disappoint ourselves and each other. This is the kind of failure we should all aspire to.”
—Tse Hao Guang, Author of The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association

“Writing, both the act and its product, is a seduction,” writes Daryl Li in The Inventors. By turns philosophical and thoughtful, romantic and filled with yearning, The Inventors locates Li’s many obsessions in the locus of writing. Spanning engagements with gardens, video games, art, poetry, photography, and theatre, Li deftly transforms the range of his experiences and encounters into nostalgic prose. His hybrid essays hover elegantly over the field of memory. The myths, histories, and relations that haunt Li’s musings reveal the image of an essayist aware of the limits and possibilities of his craft. Amidst the relative paucity of essay collections in Singapore, The Inventors stands out for its display of capaciousness and honesty.”
—Jonathan Chan, Author of going home

“Daryl Li’s The Inventors is an uncategorisable, unrelentingly gorgeous tour de force. It contemplates the fallibility and necessity of memory, the imperative to narrativise and so order our lives despite the elisions of story, and asks how we know who we are if we cannot even name who we have been. Li writes that “Every story is a ghost story, every story is a ghost,” as marginalia on a ghost story whose annotations regarding the circumstances and context that created the story eventually overwhelms and exceeds the tale itself. The text is rich and capacious and robust in reference: Derrida, Rimbaud, Theroux, Valéry, Bolaño, Cortázar, Barthes on Arcimboldo, are brought to bear on life, while narratives diverse as Indiana Jones, the plays of Kuo Pao Kun, Jurassic Park, Millenium Actress, and Resident Evil are invoked and interrogated in turn. With great humility and nuance, Li considers his life and regrets and memories, a fugue of lost lovers, lost family, the botanic gardens, orchids, culinary art, the Japanese military occupation of Singapore, arboriculture, theatre, scars. Stunning black-and-white photos intersperse the text, offering the “momentary trace” of artifactual memory that become sites of recollection and reification. All the world is raised as spectre and memory and immanent self—every ghost is mourned—in this brilliant and rich debut.”
—Michael Copperman, Author of Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta

Daryl Li is a writer of literary fiction and nonfiction based in Singapore. His first book, The Inventors, is a collection of creative nonfiction published by Rosetta Cultures. His work has been longlisted for the Australian Book Review Calibre Essay Prize and Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, and been a finalist in the Georgia Review Prose Prize. He has won a Golden Point Award for short fiction. His work can be found in publications including Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, NANG, OF ZOOS, Unwinnable Monthly, and Gastronomica.

He can be found on Instagram, Twitter, and Threads at @nonstickpanda.