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
“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
Cat Dellosa is the author of The Summer of Letting Go, For the Win, and many other books. Her contemporary works are famous for their ability to draw tears of both laughter and deep emotion from her readers. Ex Libris Philippines interviewed her about her biggest literary influences. You started out as a games journalist… Read More Catherine Dellosa: Gamester and Wordsmith
“A god lives in this house.” ASCENSION is a novel with such a strong sense of time, people, and place, it feels almost real. A word of caution: Drinking your pumpkin spice latte while reading Eliza Victoria’s latest novel might not be the best idea. You might end up spilling it out of sheer fright,… Read More Ascension: When A God Haunts A House
To read the English translation of filmmaker and Ateneo college professor Alvin Yapan’s book Worship the Body (Sambahin Ang Katawan) is to be awash in a sea of images. Of clothing revealing nakedness (between man and wife, and man and fellow man). Of sea and sky, lands urban and rural. While acclaim and praise follow… Read More Worship The Body: What Price Love?
If author Ronaldo S. Vivo Jr.’s aim is to leave readers devastated, if the intention is to give us no respite from cruelty or from descriptions of material and moral filth, if the purpose is to shove this country’s reality in our faces when we would prefer to look away, then The Power Above Us… Read More The Power Above Us All: Today’s Trauma in Translation
Douglas Candano’s collection of eight stories are all set in one universe that feels so much like ours, but defy Newtonian physics in its population that includes amalgamations of aswang and the Chinese jiangshi, as well as museums that house experiences rather than relics, and historical events with a few monsters thrown in the mix.… Read More Infinite Lives, Infinite Deaths: Chillingly Cold Prose Delivers 8 Doses of Fil-Chi Horror
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