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 Hagedorn's latest masterpiece described by the New York Times Book Review as "a narrative collage hopscotching from year to year, from place to place and from one point of view to another: that's what Jessica Hagedorn offers in her intricate new novel, which boldy links a Manila millionaire's 'discovery' of a Stone Age tribe on Mindanao with a filmed recreation of the Vietnam War on that same guerilla-plagued island six year later."
I just started reading this novel and am savoring every word of it - that is why I elected to read it only on the train going home from work.
I usually finish a novel in one sitting. But this one deserves to be taken in slowly ... as I want to live and relive within the
countless web of stories in it. It is a very lush and baroque
novel just like her Dogeaters of several years ago, and just like the Philippines, full of contradictions,
half-baked notions, inferiority and at the same time superiority complex, characters dropping by and disappearing without excuses,
confusions, noise, dust, grime, and all the things we miss from home.
If you are a martial law baby, this will take you back to that era of dangerous uncertainty, breathing in and choking on
that insidious feeling of confinement
and self-imposed censorship. You just know. Sometimes you even squeal (well, I guess me) with delight when you encounter a character
or an event that you recognize. I may sound like I am portraying the book as insular but it's not. It works on so many levels
and for those of you who missed that
era or who don't know anything about the Philippines, there's enough here to learn about the horrible
undercurrent prevailing during that dark, yet to some, golden age of the Philippine history that, catches up with us when we least expect it.
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 From the Publisher NEW BOOK REINTRODUCES WRITINGS OF CELEBRATED FILIPINO AMERICAN POET AND FICTION WRITER JOSE GARCIA VILLA Kaya is proud to present The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by Jose Garcia Villa, a collection of poetry and prose by the celebrated Filipino American writer, edited by Eileen Tabios and with a foreword by Jessica Hagedorn. At the height of his career, in the forties and fifties, Villa's writings earned him prizes, fellowships, and lavish praise from such literary luminaries as Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore, e. e. cummings, W. H. Auden, and Mark Van Doren. Yet, his work has been out of the public eye for more than thirty years, and out of print for more than fifteen. Although named a National Artist in the Philippines where he was born, Villa remains largely unknown here in the United States, where his reputation among the elite of modernist experimental poets was made.
Kaya's republication of Villa's writings both recovers and rediscovers the work of this fierce iconoclast for a new generation. Included are reprints of his major poems and representatives from each of his significant experiments, as well as short stories, critical work, and paintings. A critical component of the book are essays by contemporary Filipino and Filipino American writers including: Luis Cabalquinto, Nick Carbo, Jonathan Chua, Luis Francia, Nick Joaquin, E. San Juan, and Alfred Yuson. New force in the Asian American literary world, Eileen Tabios, has edited the volume, and Jessica Hagedorn, celebrated poet, novelist, and playwright, contributes a thoughtful foreword.
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Editorial Reviews
Library Journal, February 15, 2001 The book's hero is a gay Filipino hustler named William Narcisco Paulinha. |
Book Description |
 "Oliver de la Paz has created a unique work: a novella in the form of a sequence of prose poems; a lucidly inventive allegory of migration, exile, and belonging. With grace and elegance, he evokes the magical, myth-making culture of his Philippines and brings it to a very real California in the person of Fidelito, a boy who wants to fly, and his parents, Domingo and Maria Elena. Oliver de la Paz has the strength and wisdom to step lightly with the heaviest burdens. He is stunningly good. Names above Houses celebrates the trials and indestructibility of a family and is a durable refreshment, an essential document of life at the cultural crossroads." ÑRodney Jones, author of Elegy for a Southern Drawl "Oliver de la Paz creates the legend of Fidelito-a boy whose yearning to fly becomes a metaphor for immigration, sexual awakening, religious passion, and the imagination of a poet-in-the-making. As Fidelito's family trades Filipino omens of baby teeth and rats for those of the 'moonlike glow' of American television romances and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, de la Paz's deft storytelling-part magic realism, part Aesop fable-seamlessly pulls us from one adventure to the next. Through Fidelito, de la Paz weaves the odysseys of Jesus and Icarus into a lush and wonderful wanderlust." ÑDenise Duhamel, author of The Star-Spangled Banner |
 This is really an exciting find! I got an e-mail from Carolyn Sawyer of WW Norton telling me about this book by a Filipino American author. She sent me a copy - which I just received today (4-02-01) - so I am currently reading this. So far as I could tell from scanning the first few pages, this is a powerful story about Filipinos in California - about two part Filipino brothers adrift in the mainstream as well as immigrant society. Early reviews praise this book as "a window to an Asian America that is rarely acknowledged and perhaps even unrecognizable." I can't wait to read this book in its entirety. More information available at the author's website.
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 With the publication of The Samsons, comprising The Pretenders and Mass, the final two novels of the five-volume Rosales Saga, Random House has now repackaged the entire epic in handsome and accessible Modern Library paperback editions over the past three years, apparently in a final push to secure the Nobel Prize for F. Sionil JosŽ, who is now 77 years old. The two Samson novels carry this multi-generational story -- which begins (in Dusk, originally titled Po-on) with the church acolyte Istak fleeing with his family from the Ilocos to Pangasinan in the last years of Spanish rule -- into the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. In The Pretenders, Istak's great grandson Antonio Samson returns to the Philippines with a Harvard Ph.D. to become a U.P. professor, marries into great wealth, and is eventually destroyed by the intellectual and social contradictions in his life and that of his country. In Mass, Antonio's long-haired bastard son JosŽ joins the anti-Marcos urban underground, organizing students and barrio youths in Manila, but the movement is betrayed and crushed; JosŽ takes off for the mountains to become a fighting revolutionary.
The Pretenders was written in 1960 and Mass in 1976, so these
are actually the first and the last of the series by date of publication.
(Mass could not be published in the Philippines until 1983; it was
first issued in Amsterdam, in Dutch translation.) In the new Random House
editions, however, the five novels can be read in sequence beginning with
Dusk (1998), continuing with Don Vicente (1999, comprising
Tree and My Brother, My Executioner), and concluding with the
present volume, The Samsons. It's a breathtaking epic, and the good
folks in Stockholm should be taking another look.
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A reader at amazon.com has this to say about this book:
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This wonderful Filipino Wedding Workbook is now available at amazon.com!
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