Got my advance copy of MANILA NOIR! This anthology is edited by Jessica Hagedorn and will be published by Akashic Books.
We were invited to contribute to this anthology of prose stories and
Trese: Thirteen Stations is the only comic book story in the line up. It is an honor and privilege to be part of such a great collection of writers and storytellers.
MANILA NOIR will be available in the United States this June. The Philippine edition will be distributed by Anvil and will also be in local bookstores June 2013.
Here's the press release from the AKASHIC BOOKS catalogue:
http://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/manila-noir/
Launched with the summer ’04 award-winning best-seller
Brooklyn Noir,
Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir
anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a
distinct neighborhood or location within the geographical area of the
book.
Original stories by Lourd De Veyra, Gina Apostol, Budjette Tan &
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.
One of the most populous cities in the world, Manila provides the
ideal, torrid setting for noir. It’s where the rich rub shoulders with
the poor, where five-star hotels coexist with informal settlements,
where religious zeal coexists with superstition, where “hospitality”
might be another word for prostitution, where politics is often
synonymous with celebrity and corruption, where violence is nothing out
of the ordinary and pretty much anything can be had for a price.
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.”
