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The trouble with the good times is that while they’re happening, we do not know that they are the good times. They may even seem terrible. To acknowledge that they are the good times is to curse the rest of our lives: they will not be as fun, it’s all downhill from here. Time is the queen bitch who doles out wisdom only in hindsight.

The more we think about it, the more idyllic the 90s seem. There was no social media and the Internet was new. Life was lived face to face, you could touch things, and friends were people you had shared histories with. We experienced boredom, which now seems to be a luxury. It was the last time we thought we understood the world.
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My annual list.

The Oresteia, Aeschylus
Life After Life, Kate Atkinson
The Collected Poems of W.H. Auden
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Eve’s Hollywood, Eve Babitz
Grand Hotel, Vicki Baum
The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett
HHhH, Laurent Binet
The Decameron, Boccacio
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Possession, A.S. Byatt
The Outsider, Albert Camus
Burning Your Boats, The Collected Short Stories, Angela Carter
Love in a Fallen City, Eileen Chang
The Stories of Your Life, Ted Chiang
The Stories of John Cheever
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
Cheri and The Last of Cheri, Colette
Another Marvelous Thing, Laurie Colwin
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Transit, Anna Seghers
Seven Gothic Tales, Isak Dinesen
The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Don’t Look Now, Daphne Du Maurier
The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy
King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett
Compass, Mathias Enard
The End of Days, Jenny Erpenbeck
A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald
Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
Paris Stories, Mavis Gallant
Amphigorey, Edward Gorey
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley
Dune, Frank Herbert
Ripley’s Game, Patricia Highsmith
The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Black Diamond and Other Stories, Rachel Ingalls
The Lottery and Other Stories, Shirley Jackson
The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin
Jesus’s Son, Denis Johnson
For Keeps, 30 Years at the Movies, Pauline Kael
The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
The Smiley novels, John LeCarre
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem
Moon Tiger, Penelope Lively
The Balkan Trilogy, Olivia Manning
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
The Ashenden Stories, W. Somerset Maugham
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
Love In A Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
So You Don’t Get Lost In The Neighborhood, Patrick Modiano
Isabelo’s Archive, Resil Mojares
From Hell, Alan Moore
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Jan Morris
Homesick for Another World, Ottessa Moshfegh
The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories by Saki, H.H. Munro
Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata
The Friend, Sigrid Nunez
The Love Object, Selected Stories, Edna O’Brien
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa
The Collected Stories, Grace Paley
The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
Playing With Water, James Hamilton Paterson
Cubao: Pagkagat ng Dilim, Tony Perez
There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
The Book of J, translated by David Rosenberg
Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks
Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
A Sport and A Pastime, James Salter
Collected Plays, William Shakespeare
The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By, Georges Simenon
How to be both, Ali Smith
The Patrick Melrose novels, Edward St. Aubyn
The Mountain Lion, Jean Stafford
Perfume, Patrick Suskind
The Door, Magda Szabo
Oliver VII, Antal Szerb
Minotaur, Benjamin Tammuz
The Makioka Sisters, Junichiro Tanizaki
You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There (stories), Elizabeth Taylor
Flights, Olga Tokarczuk
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Ogre, Michel Tournier
The Diaries of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend
Miss Garnet’s Angel, Salley Vickers
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Once and Future King, T.H. White
The Jeeves stories, P.G. Wodehouse

We can’t travel just yet, but until then we have our stories. Our first Writing Boot Camp for 2021: Travel Stories. Three sessions in February, Saturdays from 3-6pm on Zoom. Early bird rate until January 30: Php5,000. DM @jessicazafrascats or email saffron.safin@gmail.com to book your place

*No writing experience necessary.
**No one has ever had a nervous breakdown at Writing Boot Camp, although there was much therapeutic weeping at the Memoirs workshop last year.
***Gift certificates available if you want to give the workshop to someone for Lunar New Year.

Have you ever thought that if you were locked up in your house with nothing to do, you would write all the stories you’ve been kicking around your head?

In 2020 I was locked up in my house with “nothing” to do (but endless chores and disinfecting), so I wrote the stories I’ve been kicking around my head. Before the pandemic, my plan was to write a short story every month. I ended up finishing one every other month, which was not bad even without the constant anxiety of living through a very strange year with the air trying to kill you. I had also planned to make zines, and I did—seven in total, including a story I wrote in November 2019. Apart from the writing I really enjoyed making the little magazines: printing, folding, sewing (and I loathed sewing in grade school). Later, Bianca who designed my book cover gave me a template so now I even do the layouts myself. This is what kept me sane in a year that defined Bonkers.

1. The Adventuress. Based on true stories I heard from my friend who’s lived in Paris since the 80s. A beautiful, feckless girl, raised to find a rich husband, thinks she’s finally hit the jackpot when she marries a Frenchman. She finds herself in Paris with a husband but no money, no language, no one to rely on but herself. And then she discovers that she has a mind. A love story between a woman and herself.

2. Genius and Garbage. They say you shouldn’t meet your idols. What happens when a cinephile seeks out a reclusive filmmaker living in the ruins of his once-beautiful house? This is based on the time Noel and I went to Siniloan, Laguna to interview the great director Celso Ad Castillo. It took us four hours of inching through traffic, but it was an unforgettable encounter. Castillo died a few months later.

3. Rumpelstiltzkin. Gemma’s eccentric literature professor represented the cultured world she dreamed of, where people discussed art, opera, cinema, and casually tossed off bons mots while sipping martinis in posh drawing rooms. But just how fine are “the finer things” Named for that very bad-tempered creature in the fairy tale who helps the beleaguered heroine spin straw into gold.

4. The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters, vol. I no. 1. It’s 1886 and Jose Rizal, Juan and Antonio Luna, and the Ilustrados are young men living it up in Paris, the most exciting city in the world. Drunken shenanigans! Romance! Duels! The secret lives of national heroes, as told by one very modern woman who witnessed it all.

5. The Ordinary Nurses of Halloween. In the 1990s Malate is the epicenter of Manila social life, and on Halloween night everyone gets ready for the wildest party of the year. Two fabulous gay men, Benjy and Matty, embark on a surreal comic adventure.

6. The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters, vol. I no. 2. In between attending classes, subsisting on frugal meals, moving from one cheap boarding house to another, and hanging out with his friends, Pepe Rizal writes a novel. The national uber-nerd gets an unexpected review.

7. Phantoms in the Spring. “I have never seen a ghost, a fact that has not stopped me from expecting one to materialize before me. I assume they will be translucent, floating several inches off the ground, and making weird moaning noises. Ridiculous, I know, but for this reason I avoid watching horror movies—they interfere with my sleep. When I’m about to lose consciousness I imagine a figure standing at the foot of my bed, and my eyes fly open…” Every place is haunted by history, from Galicia in the Civil War to Manila in the midst of a pandemic.

The zines are available on Shopee.

Photo by Ricky Villabona. The Age of Umbrage by Jessica Zafra is available at Shopee, Lazada, Mt Cloud, and the Ateneo University Press. For e-books and foreign orders, please go to facebook.com/ateneo press.

by Joseph L. Garcia in BusinessWorld, 4 November 2020

EVERY generation has a designated wit. For Filipinos of the 1990s and the 2000s, we’ve unofficially recognized writer Jessica Zafra as that period’s wit.

For 25 years, Ms. Zafra wrote columns for many media outlets, including The Philippine Star, Today, BusinessWorld, and Interaksyon. She also had stints as a host on TV and radio, and published her essays and columns in the book series Twisted. Ms. Zafra is known for her dry and dark humor, and could bring this flavor to any situation.

Recently, Ms. Zafra published her first novel, The Age of Umbrage. She appeared on a webinar with boho favorite Baguio bookshop Mt. Cloud on Oct. 22 to discuss the novel. A summary of the novel from the Ateneo de Manila University press reads: “Guadalupe, 15, is confused. She grew up in the house of one of the richest families in the world… in the servants’ quarters with her mother, the family cook. The life of luxury is all she knows, but it isn’t really her life. Unhappy in school, invisible at home, she lives inside her head, in a world made of books and movies. Outside, Manila is in turmoil: protest rallies, a bloodless revolution, coup attempts, and the Web hasn’t even arrived yet.”

Read it in BusinessWorld.

The Age of Umbrage by Jessica Zafra is available at Shopee, Lazada, Mt Cloud, and the Ateneo University Press. For e-books and foreign orders, please go to facebook.com/ateneo press.

by Elizabeth Lolarga, Vera Files, 5 November 2020

Jessica Zafra has been known for her sardonic prose in her columns, particularly her film criticism, and her short fiction. So yes, it’s high time she came out with a novel that reflects that hers is THE ultimate voice of her generation.

The Age of Umbrage (is this title a bow to Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence?) is rife with history and drama, much like the American novelist’s famous work. Zafra casts her caustic eye on characters that look heavily drawn from real life like the protagonist Guada (the author’s alter ego, one supposes, considering her fondness for cats, her propensity for dressing up in all-black or Goth outfits, her voracious reading), her plump mother Siony who aspires for nothing more for her family than to migrate to the US and enjoy the opportunities that land is known for, the filty rich Almagro family, the bullies in school that make the mainstay’s life a purgatory, among many.

Read it at Vera Files