Andrew Felsher’s upcoming book Child Boss (pub date: Sept 29, 2026) has been a project close to my heart. In the course of the last 10 months, we went through 3-5 rounds of editorial work, multiple meetings to speak about the desire for the book, its driving character, its skeletal language, and the process that brought this intricate storyworld into being. Working with Andrew is minuscule one second and in another, we are consumed by the blazing fire of Power, Relation, and Capital. 

Child Boss is a loaded book. To speak about it, I must first write about my relationship with Andrew. I have never met Andrew in person. In our hyperconnected-but-distant world, I have had the joy of getting to know him through a pure literary modality. And for many of us writers, a pure literary modality is simply a way of being and realising our own poetics in this world. Our poetics is our faith and desire for our futures, amongst other things.

Our relationship started when I reached out to request a copy of 128 Lit’s first print issue edited by Andrew and Yehui Zhao, which collected some of my favourite poets and artists: Kim Hyesoon, Fi Jae Lee, Don Mee Choi, Uljana Wolf, etc. and presented me with the gift of poets such as Vi Khi Nao and Saddiq Dzukogi. Honestly, I fell in love with the issue, its elegance and cohesion are delightful. Andrew was also eager to connect with me—now I realise this as his desire to grow the 128Lit literary community—and quickly asked me if I’d like to be on the editorial team of 128Lit. 

In the last four years, Andrew and I have worked on multiple literary projects for the literary platform 128Lit. Following two print issues, the team saw 128Lit morph into a small press, with its first book publication, My Women by Yuliia Iliukha in 2024. Yuliia’s manuscript found its way to 128Lit through our 2023 Chapbook Contest and expanded the scope of 128Lit in a way that perhaps we ourselves did not see coming. A feeling that the works were finding us… finding the space, constellation, and cosmology of 128Lit.

Our way of approaching the platform became more intuitive. We wanted the platform to mirror our world without any obstructions or overbearing manifestoes. 128Lit was growing a digital embodiment of its own through the What is Home? and (Re)familiarize projects. The scope of the texts/works expanded and carried forward the intentions from previous texts/works.

 By the end of the (Re)familiarize project, there had been so many moments when Andrew and I were in absolute sync. He knew exactly which poet I’d pick as my top from a string of submissions and why. We shared thoughts on “curating” and “editing”, but with a devotional type of attention and love to 128Lit and the artists, poets and writers who have entrusted us with their works. Our talks also absorbed the personal into them, our cityscapes of New York and Berlin, love, loss, and other places a constant in the background. Then came Child Boss!

 Child Boss follows a young boy who is dedicated to becoming a tenacious baller. But his overworked mother cannot afford to nourish his dreams, and his highly educated father does not make money. This leads the boy to seek work at twelve, dragging the overbearing weight of capitalism into the foreground.

Imagine an experiment where you are i) set in the shoes/consciousness of a child and ii) set against a brutal system. How would you shift the paradigm? Is it even possible?

 A clear voice, an explosive momentum, a narrative that flips its own mode to let the readers access the fullness of this storyworld, I was at first intimidated by its enoughness, its bare bones that carried a hard clarity. As an Editor, it would be a delightful challenge to preserve this clarity that falls in place by the succinct choices for perspective and focalisation, and at the same time, catch spaces in between. Catch a work where it may have a small hesitation. That is exactly how the process of editing Child Boss went. At times, I watched Andrew balance fine tensions, often ones that carried heavy emotions and trepidations for him.

I embodied a young boy who seeks ways to make money (to make a dream come true) and in the process learns from a terrible order of the world… He learns the hierarchy of money, the absurd centrality of it in the lives of us fleshed and human. Though the child is abandoned many times by the frugality of these structures and people devastated by them, it is the child who has the power to save us. This makes it a tender and delicately subversive work for me, a book I’m waiting to read once again, without my Editor cap.

Andrew’s way of moving, creating and connecting has deeply moved me. In many ways, Child Boss is a result of his efforts to realise his own work within the vehicle of literary entanglement that is 128Lit. I am happy to be part of this journey!

 ——————————————————————————

We have planned a Virtual Book Talk for Child Boss, with Andrew, Ruby Wang (Non-Fiction Editor, 128Lit) for Oct 8, 18:00-19:00 Berlin time. You can register using the following link.

We are organising bookstore distribution and ebook distribution in Berlin for Child Boss. In the meantime, if you’d like a physical copy, you can email me or message me.