Fiction / Literature / Comics / Graphic novels: special features

Book SynopsisIf you eat while lying down, you will turn into a snake. If you don't polish off all the rice on your plate you will marry a man full of pimples and pockmarks.Looking After the Ashes is a semi-biographical fiction of Kopi Soh's childhood stories. Growing up in a large extended Taoist influenced Peranakan family filled with strong women, Soh hears these words of 'wisdom' daily. She used to live in a world where clipping finger nails at night was strictly forbidden, pointing at the moon would result in one's ears getting chopped off, and children were forced to stay indoors during sundown for fear of collision with evil forces. A world where mental disorders and illnesses were believed to be caused by malevolent spirits. Talisman, mediums and fortune tellers were a part of everyday life.

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Book SynopsisAriston Letrero is a renaissance man: audio producer, insurance salesman, musician, composer, part-time fast food mascot, and an adulterer who quickly and quietly abandons his wife and son, Lucas, at the peak of his mottled career,for a new life in America with his lover Odette.Years and years later, he sends an email to his son, Lucas, an advertising man who has been brought up on super robot cartoons, Catholic school truisms, and a diet of fast food and loneliness, and who has reconnected with his childhood sweetheart Dedes, who has made a post-annulment life for herself in America.In the 30-odd years in between is a story that sings songs and anthems of identity, relations, loneliness, and loss, and how they figure in the lives of contemporary Filipinos who are scattered across space and time, but who are also connected and separated at the same time.Joy is a story of joy—lived forward, backward, sideways, and upside down, in lives and loves that are fragmented, separated, gathered, made virtual, and made real.

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