“The status quo did not mean peace.” Glenn Diaz’s 2022 novel about a middle-aged teacher fleeing her violent past has been picked up by Tilted Axis Press, as well as shortlisted for the Novel Prize in 2020. It is many things: a literary crime novel, a concise history of Philippine contemporary history from the time… Read More Yñiga: A Literary Crime Novel that Tackles the Past and Future of Being Filipino
Sunlight and dust motes flooded the air as I cracked open the pages of Kenneth Yu’s sophomore short story collection. His earlier book featured a lot of stories that would comfortably be classified as horror. As a result, this reviewer purposefully read this second collection of stories during the day, expecting that it would have… Read More The Greatest Fight of Sunny Granada: Speculatively Hopeful Filipino Fiction
If you’re lucky, you get treated to a tarot reading when you have your book signed by Yvette Tan, whom fans are calling “The Queen of Philippine Horror.” Tan then explained what the three cards meant, then inscribed the book with the message of the fates, accompanied by her red stamp. (In this reader’s case,… Read More Insect Hag: Creepy Crawlies and Cultural Preservation
A son of Manila, my late father owned an imposing hardcover brown volume which he treasured and encouraged his teenaged children to read. We used the busyness of youth as an excuse not to when really, we were intimidated by its thickness. The book has mysteriously vanished, to our belated sorrow. So it was with… Read More Manila, My Manila: Glories of the Past Resurrected
Author Laurel Flores Fantauzzo describes this book as the product of a haunting. The 2009 murders of film journalists Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc moved her so deeply that she spent the next six years (eight with revisions) writing about the couple. What was originally meant as an academic thesis became a finalist in the… Read More The First Impulse: Immortalizing Lives and Loves
F.H. Batacan’s newest book comes 26 years after she wrote the award-winning novel Smaller and Smaller Circles, which was hailed as a crime classic and turned into a 2017 film starring Nonie Buencamino and Sid Lucero. Set in the same Manila as her previous book, the short story collection manages to be both very similar… Read More Accidents Happen: Angry Stories that Thirst for Justice
FIVE BUSINESS LESSONS is a selection of twenty-one interviews by financial analyst Henry Ong, who has been writing for publications such as the Inquirer and Esquire Philippines for the past decade. These interviews are culled from Ong’s Esquire Philippines column Financial Adviser , but also feature two brand new ones found at the very start… Read More Five Business Lessons: Interviews with Folks Who Struck Gold
“In a way, we were all massacred. Only, some of us were fortunate to have lived through it.” Crimson as arterial blood, the cover of the nonfiction book Rampage : MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila by James M. Scott gives an idea of the extremely graphic violence depicted inside. It’s an unputdownable weighty… Read More Rampage: When Manila’s Streets Ran Red with Blood
“We overestimate our capacity to remember even as we underestimate our capacity to forget… if erasure is the default mode of engagement with the past, then we must become active agents of the labor of remembrance.” Gideon Lasco’s most recent book is a clear-eyed collection of essays that were written during the pandemic, a compilation… Read More Face Shield Nation: COVID in the Philippines Seen Through Honest Yet Hopeful Eyes
Baguio is awash with tourists and Manileños all bundled up in Uniqlo Heattech this Christmas and New Year season. There may be another reason for the cold atmosphere: the chill of the supernatural. The Baguio depicted in OHA by Krie R. Lopez is one peopled by ghosts. The book starts with a teenager’s death from… Read More OHA Gives A Voice to Baguio’s Ghosts
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