JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

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.

P250/issue + shipping. The first issue is out now. Second issue in November, third issue in January, and fourth issue in March. Subscriptions are available. Email saffron.safin@gmail.com or DM @jessicazafrascats.

We donate part of the proceeds to the UP Ikot and Toki drivers, whose livelihood has been affected by the pandemic.

We’re told that Rizal and the ilustrados lived in Paris in the 1880s. What if one of the ilustrados was a woman? An independent woman who wore men’s suits, knew all the interesting characters of the day, and did whatever she wanted? She didn’t exist, so I made her up.

Who could draw a later George Sand, early Marlene Dietrich, proto-Madonna…why, Madonna’s ambassador to earth himself, Ricky Villabona. Spot the maps of France and the Philippines.

Presenting our latest zine: The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters, Volume 1, No. 1. First of a 4-part series. On sale August 31. P250. Email saffron.safin@gmail.com to pre-order, or message me @jessicazafrascats.

Reading Ali Smith is the most exhilarating experience. The things she can do with words—she bends them to her will, makes them fly with no visible effort. Her writing is exuberant, eccentric, and just when we thought everything has been done, original. Beginning in 2016, when Brexit signalled the end of the world as we know it (for me it was Prince’s death and then elections) she’s written a novel a year about our bizarre new world, where the truth is not the truth and everything you believe is wrong. The last volume Summer is hot off the presses, and in it the pandemic has begun. And yet the Seasonal Quartet is full of hope in humanity. Our species is not done yet.

Antkind, from the screenwriter of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is not a novel to be consumed quickly. It is best read a chapter at a time in order to get to know its protagonist, film critic B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, and enjoy its comic invention without becoming violently irritated at his dithering and self-loathing. Occasionally it is advisable to hurl it across the room, and when one’s tantrum has passed, to retrieve it and put it back on the shelf to return to the next day. It is about Rosenberg’s discovery of a stop-motion movie whose total running time is 3 months (Yes, a 3-month-long movie, so Bela Tarr and Lav Diaz have ADHD in comparison), and when it is destroyed, his attempts to reconstruct it from memory. Antkind is like your neurotic friend whom you can only bear in small doses but can’t write off entirely because suddenly they’ll do something brilliant.