Chiara is working on a film about an incident in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901, when Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison, and in retaliation American soldiers created “a howling wilderness” of the surrounding countryside. Magsalin reads Chiara’s film script and writes her own version. Insurrecto contains within its dramatic action two rival scripts from the filmmaker and the translator—one about a white photographer, the other about a Filipino schoolteacher.Within the spiraling voices and narrative layers of Insurrecto are stories of women—artists, lovers, revolutionaries, daughters—finding their way to their own truths and histories. Using interlocking voices and a kaleidoscopic structure, the novel is startlingly innovative, meditative, and playful. Insurrecto masterfully questions and twists narrative in the manner of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, and Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Apostol pushes up against the limits of fiction in order to recover the atrocity in Balangiga, and in so doing, she shows us the dark heart of an untold and forgotten war that would shape the next century of Philippine and American history.

    On a clear day in winter, the battered corpse of Crispin Salvador is pulled from the Hudson River—taken from the world is the controversial lion of Philippine literature. Gone, too, is the only manuscript of his final book, a work meant to rescue him from obscurity by exposing the crimes of the Filipino ruling families. Miguel, his student and only remaining friend, sets out for Manila to investigate.To understand the death, Miguel scours the life, piecing together Salvador’s story through his poetry, interviews, novels, polemics, and memoirs. The result is a rich and dramatic family saga of four generations, tracing 150 years of Philippine history forged under the Spanish, the Americans, and the Filipinos themselves. Finally, we are surprised to learn that this story belongs to young Miguel as much as to his lost mentor, and we are treated to an unhindered view of a society caught between reckless decay and hopeful progress.Exuberant and wise, wildly funny and deeply moving, Ilustrado explores the hidden truths that haunt every family. It is a daring and inventive debut by a new writer of astonishing talent.

    People are puzzled how she can spontaneously make them laugh in the midst of national policy crises, and of real danger to her life as a corruption fighter.This book is a collection of jokes, one-liners, pick-up lines, conebacks and speeches delivered and/or curated by the beloved Senator. Also, inside are illustrations by Cj de Silva-Ong, Manix Abrera, Elbert Or, Rob Cham and more of the Philippines' best young illustrators.

    As Hagedorn points out in her insightful introduction, Manila is a city burdened with a violent and painful past, with a long heritage of foreign occupation. The specters of WWII (during which the city suffered from U.S. saturation bombing), and the oppressive 20-year reign of dictator Ferdinand Marcos live on in recent memory. The Filipino take on noir includes a liberal dose of the gothic and supernatural, with disappearance and loss being constants."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)"This Southeast sampler is unique, possessing an overall gritty tone. Each slice of supernatural splendor pulls the reader in with their nontraditional heroes…Ultimately, readers get a strong taste of the real Manila and all her dark secrets, wanting more of while being slightly afraid of what she might do next. Manila is the perfect place for noir scenes to occur, and it is easy to get sucked into its deadly nightshade of doom."--Criminal Class PressBrand-new stories by: Lourd De Veyra, Gina Apostol, Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo, F.H. Batacan, Jose Dalisay Jr., Eric Gamalinda, Jessica Hagedorn, Angelo Lacuesta, R. Zamora Linmark, Rosario Cruz-Lucero, Sabina Murray, Jonas Vitman, Marianne Villanueva, and Lysley Tenorio.Manila provides the ideal, torrid setting for an Akashic Noir series volume. It's where the rich rub shoulders with the poor, where five-star hotels coexist with informal settlements, where religious zeal coexists with superstition, and where politics is often synonymous with celebrity and corruption.From the Introduction by Jessica Hagedorn:Manila is not for the faint of heart. Built on water and reclaimed land, it’s an intense, congested, teeming megalopolis, the vital core of an urban network of sixteen cities and one municipality collectively known as Metro Manila. Population: over ten million and growing by the minute. Climate: tropical. Which means hot, humid, prone to torrential monsoon rains of biblical proportions.I think of Manila as the ultimate femme fatale. Complicated and mysterious, with a tainted, painful past. She’s been invaded, plundered, raped, and pillaged, colonized for four hundred years by Spain and fifty years by the US, bombed and pretty much decimated by Japanese and American forces during an epic, month-long battle in 1945.Yet somehow, and with no thanks to the corrupt politicians, the crime syndicates, and the indifferent rich who rule the roost, Manila bounces back. The people’s ability to endure, adapt, and forgive never ceases to amaze, whether it’s about rebuilding from the latest round of catastrophic flooding, or rebuilding from the ashes of a horrific world war, or the ashes of the brutal, twenty-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos . . .Many years have passed since the end of the Marcos dictatorship. People are free to write and say what they want, yet nothing is different. The poor are still poor, the rich are still rich, and overseas workers toil in faraway places like Saudi Arabia, Israel, Germany, and Finland. Glaring inequities are a source of dark humor to many Filipinos, but really—just another day in the life . . .Writers from the Americas and Europe are known for a certain style of noir fiction, but the rest of the world approaches the crime story from a culturally unique perspective. In Manila Noir we find that the genre is flexible enough to incorporate flamboyant emotion and the supernatural, along with the usual elements noir fans have come to expect: moody atmospherics, terse dialogue, sudden violence, mordant humor, a fatalist vision.

    BurgosCase 4: Our Secret Constellation

    Marks the seasons of the author's life, her early writing, her work as active media practitioner, and her religio-spiritual writing.

    At that time, new York was already the finance capital of the world. But during that period, around 650,000 serious crimes and murders were committed yearly in that city. No one could solve the problem.Then 2 police consultants experimented on making improvement in new York City's subway train system, used by almost 7% of New Yorkers, but where conditions then were horrible. The waiting platforms were poorly lit and damp, while the walls were covered with all kinds of graffiti. The trains themselves were filthy, the floors littered with trash, and were often late.First, they removed all the graffiti, and painted clean the platforms and the trains/ Then they posted plain-clothes policeman in all stations to arrest those who did not pay train tokens. In a few years, criminality in New York City declined sharply by 65%. Two little things-removal of graffiti and presence of policemen. By they changed the culture and the face of New York.Gladwell says "do not underestimate the power of little things." they can spur a revolution.If "little things"can change a city, they can change a country."Life is made up of little things. Greatness follows if we learn to be great in little things," says Charles Simmons.Because of his book, Gladwell has been cited as one of the World's 100 Influential people by TIME Magazine this year. And his book is changing the mindsets of people around the world.

    Because of this we have no memory of ourselves: we remember only the last deluge, the last seismic upheaval. Two friends are hired by Marcos to rewrite Philippine history. Their mission: to make it appear that Marcos was destined to rule the country in perpetuity. Working from an office called Agency for the Scientific Investigation of the Absurd, they embark on a journey that will take them across a surreal panorama of Philippine politics and history, and in the process question all their morals and beliefs. This landscape includes mythological sultans, mercenaries, the Beatles, messianic Amerasian rock stars, faith healers, spies, torturers, sycophants, social climbers, sugar barons, millenarian vigilantes, generals and communists--the dizzying farrago of lovers and sinners who populate the country's incredible story. By the end of their project--and this breathtaking novel--the reader emerges from a world that is at once familiar and unbelievable. It's what real life might look like if both heaven and hell were crammed into it, and all its creatures were let loose.

    1: You don't kill the body you inhabit.Rule No. 2: You should never again mention your previous name.Rule No. 3: You don't ever talk about your previous life. Ever.Two young men with the power to take over another body inhabit the bodies and lives of brothers Jonah and Louis. The takeover leads to a car crash, injuring Jonah's legs and forcing them to stay in the brothers' house for the time being.The street is quiet. The neighbors aren't nosy. Everything is okay.They are safe, for now.Until they find a dead body in the basement.

    "As in the Noli, we have in Ang Tundo Man a story of individuals in love, unfolded against a carefully authenticated social background in order to dramatize the contemporary national experience."

    forces battle to possess the Philippine Islands, the Karangalan family hides with their neighbors in a cramped cellar, where they glean hope from the family stories and folktales they tell each other. These stories of love, survival, and family blend the supernatural with the rich, little known history of the Philippines, the centuries of Spanish colonization, the power of the Catholic church, and the colorful worlds of the Spanish, Mestizo, and Filipino cultures.As the villagers tell their stories in the darkened cellar below, Holthe masterfully weaves in the stories of three brave Filipinos--a teenage brother and sister and a guerilla fighter--as they become caught in the battle against the vicious Japanese forces above ground.Inspired by her father's firsthand accounts of this period, Tess Uriza Holthe brings to magical and terrifying life a story of the hope and courage needed to survive in wartime.

    Plus the portrait of a hip chick from then Swinging London as she discourses indelicately on a most delicate topic: the Filipino as Lover.

    The story of Francisco, who is torn in his love for two women both with outstanding qualities—: Christy, his fianceé of many years, and Magda, the mysterious widow.

    In this vision of the future, popular actor Aga Muhlach is the aging President, the Eraserheads are on a Reunion Tour that spans the stars, and Philippine Spacelines is offering a 50% discount on Moon Travel. We follow the musings of a young man as he journeys through the city, headed for the Grand Liwayway Station, where he plans to take the cheapest train out, since they just opened the Tagaytay Ocean Tunnel connecting to Cebu. All the while, he is composing a missive addressed to his love, who is living on a faraway Orbital Space Station.(from wikipedia.org)

    Set in future Manila, a gleaming metropolis where one's paranoia may not be exactly unfounded and whose lashing sings tribute to Philip K. Dick. "Stations" takes on the ethical trappings of high technology adoption. "August Moon" relies on a succession of flashbacks to uncover, as well as obscure, the eventual doom of a woman who deems herself a "good wife," while "Eyes as Wide as the Sky" depicts a post-war world—scorched yet not wholly devoid of hope. These stories insist on the unreal becoming the real, the rational melding with the irrational, familiarity breeding strangeness.