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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 Paul John Caña in Esquire, 17 October 2020

In Jessica Zafra’s The Age of Umbrage, we meet Guada. Precocious, no-nonsense and a voracious consumer of books, music and film, she anchors a book that is part-bildungsroman and part-social critique, set during a time when pop culture was inescapable, but just before the dawn of the internet.

We meet Guada’s parents first, a mismatched pair whose eventual estrangement leads mother and daughter to take up residence in the mansion of the Almagros, one of the wealthiest families in the Philippines. Here, Guada will get a taste of what Fitzgerald was talking about when he said “the rich, they’re not like you and me.” (We’re paraphrasing, of course).

This is Zafra’s first novel, which is something of a surprise, considering she’s one of the more familiar names in contemporary Filipino literature. The former newspaper columnist and TV host (and erstwhile band manager of the Eraserheads) has built a cult following for her wry observations on life, with a particular focus on current issues, arcane bits of entertainment trivia, and her signature theory on world domination (via the country’s diaspora).

Read it in Esquire

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 Noelle Q. De Jesus in the Asian Books Blog, 15 October 2020

That Jessica Zafra is a great writer goes without saying; but her wit and acerbity, her idea (only somewhat facetious) of world domination via yaya and domestic helper make the notion of a novel from her irresistible. Only consider the volumes of Twisted columns she’s sold over two decades, apart from three short story collections, and it’s understandable that The Age of Umbrage (Bughaw, an imprint of Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2020) could not have come soon enough.

A slim book with easy-on-the-eye-catching cover art by Bianca Alexandra Ortigas in bright Crayola red violet, its slightness in my hands is disconcerting. Flipping through, I note the book’s entire six chapters ending at a petite 126 pages. That’s thirty pages fewer than one of my all-time-favorite novels: Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (which a few critics have called a novella). And then there is her very first sentence, a wistful, heartrending line with hardly a pause for a breath through a substantial paragraph that recalls Nick Joaquin.

From the outset, we sense a master in command of language, smooth as milk, and so all-knowingly authoritative, we relax, confident we won’t be jolted out of the reverie by awkward diction, an inorganic sentence or an overwrought adverb. We turn ourselves over, the way we might turn over in a dream. It’s hard not to hear Zafra’s voice in our head. The buy-in is immediate.

Read it in the Asian Books Blog

The Age of Umbrage by Jessica Zafra is available at Shopee, Lazada, Mt Cloud, and the Ateneo University Press.

by Scott Garceau in the Philippine Star, 11 October 2020

Jessica Zafra once took umbrage when I suggested one of Haruki Murakami’s novels was a doorstop. “That’s not a doorstop,” she scoffed, referring to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’s scant 640 pages. Things like Dune fit in the “doorstop” category, she chided, or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

At 126 pages, Zafra’s first novel, The Age of Umbrage, is no doorstop either. It’s probably technically a novella, falling below 40,000 words (I would guess). But it’s no less packed with wit and invention than other, lengthier literary outings out there.

Those familiar with Zafra will know her take on things. An arch revelation of something patently absurd, usually within Filipino society. Sometimes a paragraph constructed largely to service a punchline. A thready comparison that ticks and ticks until it explodes like a humor IED.
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Thank you to Fifi and Padma at Mt Cloud Bookshop for organizing the online event, and to everyone who attended the launch last night! If you missed it, you can still watch the launch at the Mt Cloud page.

The Age of Umbrage is published by Ateneo University Press. Cover art by Bianca Alexandra Ortigas.

The Age of Umbrage is available at Mt Cloud Bookshop in Baguio and on their Facebook and Instagram, at Shopee and Lazada, and soon at Fully Booked, online and at their branches. For foreign orders, please contact the Ateneo University Press.

Join us at www.facebook.com/mtcloud on Saturday, 17 October at 7pm for the launch of The Age of Umbrage. I will read from my novel and then do a Q&A. Get your books now at Mt Cloud, Shopee, Lazada, and soon at Fully Booked.

There is no acknowledgments section in my new book or it would be longer than the novel (126 pages only). This novel took way too long to come into being, and it would not exist without my friends. Who, being my friends, would prefer not to be mentioned. (If someone announces it loudly, check with me.) Thank you to the friends who hang out with me for no reason, who enjoy our long, pointless meals where we laugh hysterically at things we won’t remember (Well I do, because material), who buy my books and force them on their friends, who know the difference between my written and actual selves, who took an interest in cats just to humor me and have now been colonized. I wrote The Age of Umbrage in 2016, in 3 months (after decades of false starts), so I don’t remember exactly what’s in it, but if you find your name in it or recognize a character as being based on you, remind me!

Published by Ateneo University Press. Cover art by Bianca Alexandra Ortigas.
SRP P295. Buy your copies online at Mt Cloud Bookshop, Shopee, or Lazada. Coming soon to Fully Booked.

Online book launch on 17 October 2020, 7pm at Mt Cloud! Will post invitation.