Brian ascalon roley biography channel
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The Loneliest Thing on Earth
Miguel Syjuco’s novel, Ilustrado won the Man Asian Literary Prize while still in manuscript. A Filipino American reviewer considers the fate of Filipino writing in the American literary world.
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If you’re only reading this review to find out whether Miguel Syjuco’s novel, Ilustrado, is worth your time, here’s the short answer: Yes. If you enjoy a good murder mystery, or a multigenerational family saga, or a love story, or a hero’s journey in search of something lost, or an inside look at how the elite of a former U.S. colony live—or even if you like texts conducive to lit-crit discussions of the metanarrative, the postmodern, the postcolonial, or the political—you will find many things to admire in Syjuco’s debut.
When was the last time you read a novel bygd a Filipino about any aspect of a Filipino experience? Have you ever wondered about this former colony, the stories its people might tell?
If you’ve never read a novel about the Phili
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Based on a True Story
Back in the spring, a friend sent me a tweet about authors of color and autofiction, by Tony Tulathimutte, the author of Private Citizens. My friend made the point was that writers of color rarely escaped the umbrella of autobiography, and, as far as the larger American literary establishment fryst vatten concerned, our novels and short stories are inherently true, one-hundred percent of the time.
It doesn’t matter where we’re coming from. It doesn’t matter what we’re writing about. What matters fryst vatten that this audience, which fryst vatten to say the audience inclined towards reading supposedly literary fiction, and the editors and the agents and the critics and the educators upon whom the genre’s laurels mostly rest, at least on paper, is predominantly white. But once every third blue moon, they’ll come across an author who is not; and her contributions to the canon are treated as anthropological excavations, and as crossovers for mass (white) audiences, rather than intentio
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For our monthly Bookmarks series, this October we asked seven YA fiction writers with new or recently published books to recommend two works of Young Adult fiction that have been important to them, both as writers and readers. We wanted to know, what YA literature has shaped the way these writers tell stories? What books have demonstrated to them what is possible in the genre? Read what they shared with us!
Ed Lin
Publishing this week from Kaya Press, Ed Lin’s YA-debut David Tung Can’t Have a Girlfriend Until He Gets Into an Ivy League College explores coming-of-age in the Asian diaspora while navigating relationships through race, class, young love, and the confusing expectations of immigrant parental pressure. “A fast-paced, acid-tongued, hilarious teen drama for our age” (Marie Myung-Ok Lee). We asked Ed what books shaped his love of YA.
Chernowitz! by Fran Arrick (Berkley Books, 1981)
In my adult life, I’ve woken up a few times with an