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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

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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