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TWISTED, the 25th Anniversary Edition, is available now!

A selection of the most memorable pieces from the first 3 Twisted books, which you lent to friends who never returned them, or lost to Typhoon Ondoy, and couldn’t replace because they’re out of print.

Includes “A Simple Proposal for World Domination”, “The Vulcan Mind and Cheese Meld”, “Basic Icoñography”, that review of Joey Gosiengfiao’s Temptation Island, and coverage of the worst, most inadvertently hilarious Filipino novel we’ve ever read.

With a cover by Bianca Alexandra Ortigas paying tribute to cats and Nirvana. Published by David Jonathan Bayot at DLSU Publishing.

Get your signed copies now on Shopee (Just search “Twisted 25” in the Shopee app). Twisted 25 will soon be available at Mt Cloud Bookshop.

Up next: Limited Edition Twisted 25 notebooks, bookmarks, and gift boxes available exclusively on Shopee.

I had no intention of adopting Buffy, and she showed no interest in becoming an indoor cat. She was not cute and cuddly, and even now her comfortable life has not changed the expression on her face, which is that of a ruthless killer. Sometimes she stares at me as if she were calculating the most efficient route to my jugular, and I break out the treats to remind her that I am far more useful as a provider than as food.

Buffy was born downstairs sometime in 2016. Her ancestress used to bring me huge rat corpses in thanks for the kibble and canned food I gave the clowder. Buffy is an ordinary-looking white cat with black markings. When she was bathed for the first time, I noticed very faint orange spots on her head, making her a secret calico. Like her ancestress she was a champion slayer (hence the name) of rodents, which she annihilated efficiently and then used for football practice. I often spotted her sitting motionless by the dumpster, ears on high alert, waiting to pounce on an unfortunate rat. Almost everyday she deposited a dead rat by the security guard’s desk (her clowder’s rent), until the rat population wised up and presumably moved away. She was skinny and not friendly, although she did present me with dead rats now and then.

In 2018 she had a series of pregnancies. She gave birth to stillborn kittens one morning, and was back on the hunt by the afternoon. She got pregnant two more times after that, but the kittens always died. (I don’t know much about my human neighbors, but I am very well-informed about the habits of the neighborhood cats.) When she became pregnant again in mid-2019, I thought she could use some extra nutrition and began feeding her more often. Even then she must’ve needed more protein because I saw her eating one of the rats she had killed.

The added protein worked. In late July she gave birth to four healthy white and black kittens. One of the guards found an abandoned kitten in front of the 7-11 and gave it to Buffy, who nursed it along with her own kittens. The kittens quickly grew big and frisky, but Buffy began to look scrawny and ill, and by late August she seemed exhausted. One night I saw her lying beside a car, too weak or oblivious to get out of the rain. When I fed the kittens, who had been weaned and were now eating large quantities of kibble, she did not join them. Clearly she needed help. I picked her up and brought her to my apartment. She did not protest. I put her in a cardboard box with an old towel, and she went right to sleep. Drogon and Jacob watched the guest, but did not approach or hiss at her. (To this day I wonder if Jacob recognizes that she is his sister.) Buffy slept the deep sleep of exhaustion, getting up only to eat the food I brought her.

Watch for Cat People and People Cats, the zine! Illustrated by Bianca Ortigas.

In this round table, organised on the occasion of the Festival “Benengeli 2021. International Week of Literature in Spanish”, authors José Dalisay, Víctor del Árbol and Hernán Díaz have a conversation about narrative and the presence of the self in their novels, moderated by Jessica Zafra.

Casanova and the Faceless Woman
by Olivier Barde-Cabuçon
Paris, 1759. The monarchy is disintegrating, the king is a pedophile, the king’s mistress wields her influence, the clergy schemes, many conspiracies are afoot, and a woman is found murdered…and with no face. The witness: the infamous seducer Casanova, who’s fled Venice and insinuated himself into Parisian society. The detective: Volnay, the Investigator of Strange and Unexplained Deaths. The threats: powerful interests who do not hesitate to kill when threatened. The complication: a beautiful Italian woman who puts her faith in science. Casanova and the Faceless Woman is the first in an award-winning historical detective series to be translated into English. Rich in atmosphere and historical detail, pulsating with danger, it exists somewhere between Alexandre Dumas and Patrick Susskind (Perfume).

New Passengers
by Tine Høeg
The idea of an entire book written as a series of short text messages would be irritating, but the Danish author Tine Høeg imbues each line with a dry wit, insight, and feeling. The form is a perfect match for this story of a young woman just out of school, starting a teaching job, and embarking on an affair with a man she meets on the train.

Family and Borghesia
by Natalia Ginzburg
Thanks to the good people at NYRB Classics I have discovered great writers who have fallen into undeserved near-obscurity. I have the greatest affection for Natalia Ginzburg, the mid-20th century Italian author and her unaffected, unsentimental novellas of ordinary life. Family follows an extended group of friends and relations over many years, through seemingly uneventful periods and jolting change, and in its 60-odd pages manages to convey entire lives lived. In Borghesia, a woman adopts a series of Siamese cats to ward off loneliness, but the cats have ideas of their own, and life will come at you no matter how you plan for it.

The renewal of hostilities in Gaza prompted me to pick up Apeirogon, which has been in the tsundoku for months. In this protracted pandemic year I have been partial to fiction that gives me comfort, and the little I know of the Palestine issue tells me there is no comfort to be found there. As I was finishing Apeirogon, with its beautiful passages reminiscent of McCann’s wondrous Let The Great World Spin, a package of books arrived from my friend in Copenhagen whom I’ve never met in person. One of them was Minor Detail by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli. It is brief and impassive, its matter-of-fact tone and aspergetic detail triggering anxiety.

An apeirogon is a shape with countably infinite sides—if you spend your life counting them you might get an answer. That is the approach taken by McCann’s book, an epic nonfiction compendium of stories and information centered on two men, a Palestinian and an Israeli who have both lost young children in the conflict and become friends. It is the feelgood version, if you will, in which one side grasps how the other has been humiliated, and the other grasps how the legacy of trauma up to the Holocaust has shaped their antagonist. The subject is complicated, but empathy might yet save the world.

Minor Detail is pitiless and unsentimental. It opens with an atrocity committed by Israeli soldiers after the triumphant Israeli War of Independence/catastrophic displacement of 700,000 Palestinians who have lived there for many generations. A Palestinian woman becomes obsessed with this event, which is deemed so insignificant that the victim’s name is not even known. She sets out to do research, a fairly simple task that entails painstaking planning, permissions, subterfuges and humiliations, because she is living in the occupation. How can you reconstruct memory while you yourself are being erased?

I know I say “brilliant” a lot, but this book is a light source in our shady times. Initially I was drawn by the premise—woman discovers boyfriend is a popular anonymous conspiracy theorist on Instagram—but I was swiftly, then happily disappointed. It veered from the direction I’d expected and went straight into my life. Our lives, for we all live in our phones now. (I’m not saying that a novel is better because it’s “relatable” or “relevant,” but it gives the reading experience a sense of urgency.)

Fake Accounts sounds like a sharp, scathing book review, the sort I seldom see anymore because everyone has to play nice (while wishing someone would do a takedown because those are fun). I thought the tone would change at some point, but when it became clear that it would be sustained throughout, I stopped to google the author. (Which is a point the book makes, that our primary relationship is with screens and I often stop needlessly to check my phone.) Turns out I’d read Oyler before—her cutting book reviews shut up the hallelujah chorus that usually greets new work by media darlings. (The outlier/dissenting opinion is not necessarily better, but reading it is more useful for brain function.)

Then it struck me: This is what the Internet sounds like. People trying to sound smarter than they are while making the reader think she’s smarter than she is. It’s hilarious, and it’s genius. Fake Accounts is a comedy of manners set at a time when people demand authenticity even as they invent themselves online.

Following her boyfriend’s death the unnamed narrator quits her job at a media company, goes to Berlin (where she’d met her boyfriend) with no real plan, and joins a dating website. Half the book is about her dates, and it’s not a series of sexcapades. We get detailed accounts of attempts to connect with potential partners and create something real—as if this were possible when her personality and history change with each encounter. One day she’s a massage therapist, the next day a classical musician, because it’s so easy to turn into someone else (and if I claim that my cat is writing this you’ll think I’m kidding but how do you know I’m not?) Later she invents profiles according to astrological signs. Astrology isn’t real, she notes, but its influence on how people behave is real. Everyone insists they’re real, but what’s real?

The narrator is observing life rather than living it, describing emotions rather than feeling them, performing a self rather than being it. Welcome to the age of social media, which promises to connect us by putting screens between us. Where you expose your innermost thoughts in exchange for attention, and the more attention you get, the less control you have over your own thoughts (Because once you’ve had a million likes, you cannot settle for half a million). Where you are the show and your life is a performance.