Book picks similar to
Awaiting Trespass (A Pasión) by Linda Ty-Casper


philippines
fiction
500-great-books-by-women
asian-literature

The Woman Who Had Two Navels


Nick Joaquín - 1961
    It is widely considered as a classic in Philippine literature. It is divided into 5 chapters: Paco, Macho, La Vidal, The Chinese Moon, and Doctor Monson.This is a novel, not be confused with the short story collection of the same name.

Libby: The Alaskan Diaries and Letters of Libby Beaman 1879-1880


Libby Beaman - 1989
    Based on her diary, the tale of Libby, her husband, and the powerful first officer is told in all its passion. 20 line drawings.

The Magnificent Spinster


May Sarton - 1985
    After Jane’s death, the accidental discovery of poems written by Cam in her youth to Jane prompts a flood of recollections—and frees Cam to imagine in fiction Jane’s passionately vibrant life.

Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not)


José Rizal - 1887
    A passionate love story set against the ugly political backdrop of repression, torture, and murder, "The Noli," as it is called in the Philippines, was the first major artistic manifestation of Asian resistance to European colonialism, and Rizal became a guiding conscience—and martyr—for the revolution that would subsequently rise up in the Spanish province.

Weeds


Edith Summers Kelley - 1923
    This pioneering naturalist novel tells the story of a hard-working, spirited young woman who finds herself in a soul-destroying battle with the imprisoning duties of motherhood and of managing an impoverished household. The novel is particularly noteworthy for its heartbreaking depiction of a woman who suffers not from a lack of love, but from an unrequited longing for self-expression and freedom.

When the Elephants Dance


Tess Uriza Holthe - 2002
    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.

Le Baobab Fou


Ken Bugul - 1984
    The book has been translated into numerous languages and was chosen by QBR Black Book Review as one of Africa's 100 best books of the twentieth century. No African woman had ever been so frank, in an autobiography, or written so poignantly, about the intimate details of her life—a distinction that, more than two decades later, still holds true. Abandoned by her mother and sent to live with relatives in Dakar, the author tells of being educated in the French colonial school system, where she comes gradually to feel alienated from her family and Muslim upbringing, growing enamored with the West. Academic success gives her the opportunity to study in Belgium, which she looks upon as a "promised land." There she is objectified as an exotic creature, however, and she descends into promiscuity, alcohol and drug abuse, and, eventually, prostitution. (It was out of concern on her editor's part about her candor that the author used the pseudonym Ken Bugul, the Wolof phrase for "the person no one wants.") Her return to Senegal, which concludes the book, presents her with a past she cannot reenter, a painful but necessary realization as she begins to create a new life there. As Norman Rush wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "One comes away from The Abandoned Baobab reluctant to take leave of a brave, sympathetic, and resilient woman." Despite its unflinching look at our darkest impulses, and at the stark facts of being a colonized African, the book is ultimatelyinspirational, for it exposes us to a remarkable sensibility and a hard-won understanding of one's place in the world.CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French

The Revolution of Little Girls


Blanche McCrary Boyd - 1991
    As a little girl in South Carolina, she prefers playing Tarzan to playing Jane. As a teenage beauty queen she spikes her Cokes with spirits of ammonia and baffles her elders with her Freedom Riding sympathies. As a young woman in the 1960s and '70s, she hypnotizes her way to Harvard, finds herself as a lesbian, then very nearly loses herself to booze and shamans. And though the wry, rebellious, and vision-haunted heroine of this exhilarating novel may sometimes seem to be living a magnolia-scented Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, Blanche McCrary Boyd's The Revolution of Little Girls is a completely original arid captivating work.

Allegra Maud Goldman


Edith Konecky - 1976
    magazine). This endearing novel chronicles the growth of the young Allegra in pre-World War II Brooklyn as she learns about sex, death, bigotry, family limitations, and what it means to be young and female and independent.Marketing Plans for Allegra Maud Goldman: • Advance review copies to booksellers • Twenty-fifth anniversary press kit • Strong media pushEdith Konecky is the author of a second novel, A Place at the Table, as well as short fiction and poetry.

Requiem


Shizuko Gō - 1972
    Setsuko and Naomi, classmates and friends living in a bombed-out city, sort through their individual beliefs: "two girls, seventeen and fifteen at their next birthday, and though their real lives had yet to begin they were talking like old folk lost in reminiscences. Or perhaps this was their old age, for the hour of their death was near, as they well knew." Everyone close to Setsuko is dead as a result of the war, yet she believes in the war unquestioningly and writes letters to soldiers on the front urging them to fight to the finish. Naomi's father is imprisoned because of his anti-war beliefs and she struggles to find justification for war. Over the course of the novel, through flashbacks that occur within sentences or paragraphs, the horrors of the war are brought painfully to life and each young woman questions her own stand. Who is more patriotic? What are the rules of war when it is in your front yard? Shizuko Go, herself a survivor of the bombing of Yokohama, has written a devastating and important novel. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith

The Best Philippine Short Stories of the Twentieth Century


Isagani R. Cruz - 2000
    Edited by literary critic Isagani R. Cruz, this collection spans from 1925 to 1998. In this book readers will meet both famous and unfamiliar writers in both conventional and unexpected renditions of the genre. Although many of the stories are acknowledged masterpieces, the editor also chose stories on the basis of their ability to represent a particular author or decade. The stories of the 25 men and women writers represented here depict a vast gamut of human experience and emotions that, collectively, produce a stunning portrait of Philippine life and society. Dr. Cruz is a professor of literature at De Lasalle University, where he is also publisher of DLSU Press. He is himself a multi-awarded author and columnist, and the founding chair of the Manila Critics Circle. In a country where English has been the medium of instruction since the turn of the century, it is but fitting for the Philippines to share with the rest of the world its own vibrant treasury of short fiction. This richly satisfying collection represents the very best to emerge out of the Philippines in our century.

Rich Like Us


Nayantara Sahgal - 1986
    A time promising wealth for the corrupt, but terrifying with sterilization for the poor and jail for the critical, the Emergency changes forever the lives of both women.

State of War


Ninotchka Rosca - 1988
    Adrian is rich, innocent, handsome—the son of a leading family; Anna has been widowed in the rebel struggle and was herself detained and tortured by the military; Eliza, the beautiful daughter of a courtesan, is now the object of the perverted desires of the depraved Colonel Amor, Anna's tormentor.As the heat of the carnival brio rises, so do intimations of revolution, for somewhere in the jungle the rebel leader Guevara is plotting a terrorist act: a bomb will be placed at the speakers' stand timed to explode when the governor appears. Anna makes contact with the rebels, while Eliza plots to kill Amor for what he has done to her friend. And Adrian is captured and drugged by the colonel.As the tension builds, the novel moves back in time, in the Book of Numbers, on a headlong, magical, sometimes hallucinatory reprise of Filipino history and the history of the families of the three young people. We learn of the Japanese atrocities, Filipino greed and treachery, American coldness and venality. We learn how Adrian's fortune was made, how Anna became the strange and silent thinker she is, how Eliza is distantly related by European blood to Anna. And we meet characters whose literally fabulous—a woman who forces icons to respond prayers, a distillery owner who is also master of forty-two ways of self-indulgence, a self-contained maid who determines her master's fat, a boy who falls in love with saxophone, a teenage Chinese girl with bound feet who dreams of the return of the Manchu Dynasty, a German chemist unable to brew beer...Finally, in the Book of Revelations, we reawaken to the present: once again we are at the festival on K_____, about to witness the novel's shattering conclusion, its terrifying finale.Like Isabel Allende's The House of The Spirits, Ninotchka Rosca's novel is both a work of art and a powerful illumination of an entire culture and a country in conflict. Her achievement is timeless as well as masterful.

Frangipani House


Beryl Gilroy - 1986
    It is a protest at institutions that isolate, and a way of life that denies respect and responsibility for the weak.

Walls: Resisting the Third Reich: One Woman's Story


Hiltgunt Zassenhaus - 1974
    Later, as the terrible events of wartime Germany swirled around her, she risked death to smuggle food, medicine, and emotional support to hundreds of political prisoners, ultimately saving them from mass execution by the Nazis. Walls is her story. For her wartime work, Zassenhaus was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974. Walls was named on of the 25 best books of 1974 for young adults by the American Library Association and received a Christopher Award in 1975.