In the Country

Zusatztext 77520929 Informationen zum Autor Mia Alvar was born in Manila and grew up in Bahrain and New York City. Her work has appeared in One Story, The Missouri Review, FiveChapters, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Yaddo, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. A graduate of Harvard College and Columbia University, she lives in New York City. Klappentext In these nine globe-trotting tales, Mia Alvar gives voice to the women and men of the Philippines and its diaspora. From teachers to housemaids, from mothers to sons, Alvar's stories explore the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined. In the Country speaks to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call home-and marks the arrival of a formidable new voice in literature. Shadow Families Every weekend, in Bahrain in the 1980s, we took turns throwing a party. Luz Salonga hosted the first one that September of '86, and as always, we crowded into her kitchen to help. Rowena Cruz soaked rice noodles at the sink. Dulce deLumen made spring roll skins from scratch, painting batter onto the pan with a brush. Rosario Ledesma threaded sweet pork onto thin bamboo sticks. Over the clatter of dishes and the crackle of oil and the smells of vinegar, soy sauce, garlic and fermented fish sauce settling on our clothes and skin, we laughed about children and gossiped about marriage, the noise as much a comfort to us as the food itself. Soon our teenagers would come downstairs, whining of boredom. We lent them the car keys and sent them off to the shopping mall for an hour or two. They'd return with rented Betamax tapes and watch them upstairs: episodes of Top of the Pops , movies that the Ministry of Culture had cleaned up beforehand. (There was no lobster dinner in Flashdance , so far as our teens knew; no montage of oily limbs in leotards.) Flor Bautista's son Joseph had hair on his chin already; Fe Zaldivar's daughter Mary was starting to fill out her blouses. We felt we could do worse than raise them on this small Islamic desert island, where some women veiled from head to toe, where cleavage and crotches were blurry bands onscreen. Meanwhile the babies, as we'd forever call our younger children, tore through the house with their dolls and robots, trucks and ponies. Our Catholic accidents, Rita Espiritu liked to sayshe was the vulgar one. We'd given birth to them here on the island, in our late thirties and early forties. The teens, who acted more like junior aunts and uncles to them than older siblings, had helped us name them: Jason and Vanessa, Stephanie and Bruce, names they'd accuse us of mispronouncing almost as soon as they could speak. Our babies learned math from Irish nuns and played soccer with Bahraini children and changed their accents at will. Watch her bob that head from side to side like a Bumbai , said Paz Evora of her daughter Ashley, whose best friends at school were Indians. At noon and sundown, when the muezzin 's voice piped from the mosques, our babies ran to the windows. Allahu akbar! they sang, as if they knew what it meant. As for our husbands, they retreated to a room where smoking was allowed and, implicitly, women and children were not. They turned on the television and spread the Sports pages of the Manama Times between them. A horse track in Riffa held races every week, but gambling there was haraam , of course. And so our husbands made their secret bets indoors, on the same notepads where we wrote the grocery lists. Now and then a great male chorus erupted from the den, hooting at wins, groaning at losses, ribbing one another for bad calls. They waxed authoritative about odds and breeds, trifectas and photo finishes. For speed and grace, said ...

Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
A 2015 Nautilus Book Award Winner
National Book Critics’ Circle/John Leonard Prize for Best Debut finalist
 
One of the Best Books of the Year
San Francisco Chronicle • Buzzfeed • Men’s Journal • Huffington Post • *NPR • *Bustle • Electric Literature • Kirkus Reviews
A New Yorker Staff Pick

“Remarkable. . . . Each of these nine stories is superb.” —The New York Times

“Gorgeous. . . . As a reader and a new fan, I want more and more and more.” —Maureen Corrigan, “Fresh Air,” NPR
 
“Haunting and powerful. . . . Extraordinarily adept and insightful.” —The Plain Dealer
 
“A deep and textured look at Filipino culture at home and abroad. . . . Through careful, delicate prose, Alvar reveals her characters’ pasts and desires.” —Entertainment Weekly
 
“A stunning debut.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Enchanting. . . . Deft portraits of transnational wanderers, blessed and cursed with mobility.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Magnificent. . . . Debut story collections don’t come much better than this.” —The Seattle Times

“In lush, sinuous sentences, Alvar probes the enduring stain of race, colonialism, and especially class, giving voice to all strata of Philippine society.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“Graceful, carefully crafted stories—each one a world unto itself.” —Nathan Englander, author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
 
“Profound, trenchant short stories.” —People
 
“Superbly affecting. . . . So smoothly and successfully realized that it seems incredible that this volume is [Alvar’s] fiction debut.” —The Christian Science Monitor
 
“Compulsively readable. . . . Each [story]. . . has the satisfying heft of a little novel.” —Chicago Tribune
 
“Spectacular. . . . Graceful and gutsy.” —Laura van den Berg, author of The Isle of Youth and Find Me
 
“So well-drawn and plot-rich that you almost wish it were a novel. But then Alvar wouldn’t have been able to cram in so many disparate voices and painful ironies.” —New York Magazine

“Rich, meaty, fulfilling stories. . . . [Alvar’s] writing both memorializes and celebrates the lives of anyone who has ever suffered—that is to say, of us all.” —The Rumpus
 
“While the subject matter is indeed fresh, the real appeal belongs to the lush sentences, rapid pacing, and morally conflicted characters.” —The Miami New Times
 
“Marvelous. . . . [Alvar’s] diamond prose sparkles so brightly and cuts so deeply.” —Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You
 
“[Alvar] captures a global village of voices . . . with a ventriloquist’s ease.” —Vogue.com
 
“Stunning . . . the yearnings of the characters resonate well beyond the page, and each story feels as rich, as deep, and as crafted as a novel.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“So assured and so wise, these stories feel like classics already.” —Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Age of Miracles
 
“In the Country is like no book of stories I’ve ever read and I loved it deeply. . . . Alvar is an astounding writer.” —Jessica Woodbury, BookRiot
 
“Generous and heartbreaking, empathetic and insightful.” —Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans
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