ULIRÁT: BEST CONTEMPORARY STORIES IN TRANSLATION FROM THE PHILIPPINES
edited by Tilde Acuña, John Bengan, Daryll Delgado, Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III, Kristine Ong Muslim
978-0-9994514-2-7
$22.00 / Paperback / 5.5” x 8.5” / 378 pages
Gaudy Boy, March 1, 2021
N. America: Bookshop / Amazon
S.E. Asia: In the best bookstores
Distributed by Asterism & Ingram
ArtsEquator’s Hot List
TimeOut’s 14 new books we’re excited to read
Words Without Borders, The Watchlist, March 2021
Poets & Writers, "The Anthologist: A Compendium of Uncommon Collections"
CNN Philippines, Our Best Filipino Books of 2021
Writers: Corazon Almerino, Merlie M. Alunan, Roy Vadil Aragon, Genevieve L. Asenjo, John E. Barrios, Rogelio Braga, Kristian Sendon Cordero, Allan N. Derain, Early Sol A. Gadong, Omar Khalid, Perry C. Mangilaya, Timothy Montes, Carlo Paulo Pacolor, Doms Pagliawan, Zosimo Quibilan, Jr., Jay Jomar F. Quintos, Firie Jill T. Ramos, Isabel D. Sebullen, Elizabeth Joy Serrano-Quijano, Ariel Sotelo Tabág, John Iremil Teodoro, and Januar E. Yap
Translators: Tilde Acuña, Merlie M. Alunan, Roy Vadil Aragon, John Bengan, Erika M. Carreon, Shane Carreon, Bernard Capinpin, Soleil Davíd, Daryll Delgado, Eliodora L. Dimzon, Sunantha Mendoza-Quibilan, Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III, Kristine Ong Muslim, Eric Gerard H. Nebran, and Ariel Sotelo Tabág
About
A groundbreaking survey of contemporary Philippine short fiction across seven different languages.
From the foreword by Gina Apostol. “As a Filipino who dreams in Waray, I have waited too long for Ulirát.”
A man grows mushrooms from his nostrils, a town elects three mayors at the same time, a woman gives birth to a snake, and a boy wonders if his soldier father is an aswang.
Ulirát: The Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines offers alternative visions of the islands beyond poverty and paradise. A vital survey of the richness and diversity of modern Philippine short stories, Ulirát features fiction from Filipino, Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Ilocano, Waray, Kinaray-a, and Akeanon translated into English for the first time for international audiences. Vigorous writing from Filipino writers living in different parts of the archipelago re-animate Duterte’s Philippines, dramatizing everything from the drug wars and widespread corruption to environmental degradation in surprisingly surreal and illuminating ways. Ulirát, which is Tagalog for “consciousness,” champions a more expansive, nuanced conception of Filipino literature beyond the confines of English-language Filipino literature.
Editors’ Bios
Tilde Acuña teaches courses on creative writing in Filipino, popular culture, Philippine literature, and interdisciplinary research at the Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature - University of the Philippines, where he earned his MA Philippine Studies (Philippine Literature and Art Studies). Humanities Diliman, Kritika Kultura, Likhaan, Jacket2, Banwa, Ani, and other journals, anthologies, and zines have published his works. He is the author of Oroboro at Iba Pang Abiso [Oroboro and other Notices] (forthcoming from University of the Philippines Press).
John Bengan is a writer and translator from the Philippines whose work has appeared in Likhaan, Kritika Kultura , BooksActually's Gold Standard, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Words Without Borders, LIT, Shenandoah, and World Literature Today. He holds an MFA in creative writing from The New School. A recipient of a Ford Foundation International Fellowship, he has won prizes from the Philippines Free Press Literary Awards and the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for his short fiction. He lives in Davao City.
Daryll Delgado is a writer from the Philippines. Her first book, After the Body Displaces Water (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2012), was awarded the Manila Critics Circle/Philippine National Book Award for best book of short fiction in English, and shortlisted for the Madrigal-Gonzales First Book Award in 2013. Her novel, Remains (Ateneo de Naga University Press), came out in 2019. She is at work on a third book, excerpts from which have come out in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and The Near and the Far, Volume 2 (Scribe Publications, 2019). Other works can be found in Words Without Borders, Perro Berde, Kritika Kultura, Tinalunay (University of the Philippines Press, 2017), Maximum Volume: Best New Philippine Fiction (Anvil Publishing, 2014). She studied Journalism and Comparative Literature in the University of the Philippines (UP), and has taught in UP, Ateneo De Manila University, and Miriam College. She works for an international NGO, where she heads the research programs for Southeast Asia and writes global reports on labor rights issues. She was born and raised in Tacloban City, and maintains a Quezon City residence—in between regular field work around Southeast Asia—with her husband, William.
Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III teaches courses on Southeast Asian literature and creative writing at the Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature, University of the Philippines Diliman. He obtained his Master’s in Philippine literature from the same university in 2019. He is the author of the novel Aklat ng mga Naiwan (Book of the Damned) [Balangiga, 2018] and co-edited and co-translated an upcoming volume of Wiji Thukul’s poems titled Balada ng Bala (The Ballad of a Bullet) [Sentro ng Wikang Filipino, 2020]. His research and other creative works have been published in Likhaan, JONUS, Southeast Asian Studies (Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University),Talas, and Tomas.
Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of nine books of fiction and poetry, including The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017), Black Arcadia (University of the Philippines Press, 2017), Meditations of a Beast (Cornerstone Press, 2016), Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), and Lifeboat (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2015), and co-editor of two anthologies—the British Fantasy Award-winning People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction and Sigwa: Climate Fiction Anthology from the Philippines (forthcoming from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines Press). She is also the translator of several bilingual volumes: Marlon Hacla’s Melismas (forthcoming from Oomph Press) and There Are Angels Walking the Fields (forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books), as well as Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles’s Three Books (Broken Sleep Books, 2020), Hollow (forthcoming from Fernwood Press), Twelve Clay Birds: Selected Poems (forthcoming from University of the Philippines Press), and Walang Halong Biro (De La Salle University Publishing House, 2018). Widely anthologized, Muslim’s short stories have appeared in Conjunctions, Dazed Digital, Tin House, and World Literature Today. She grew up and continues to live in a rural town in Maguindanao, southern Philippines.
Praise
“This collection is a classic. . . . no other anthology has given me this pleasure: the existential jolt of recognizing ways of seeing my world that I have, in fact, experienced but, despite all my years of reading, have not encountered on the page. . . . Above all, these stories lay bare blunt historical, political, and economic realities that remain, on many levels, unspeakably surreal. . . . as a Filipino who dreams in Waray, I have waited too long for Ulirát.”
—Gina Apostol, author of Insurrecto, from the “Foreword”
“With a manifesto-like introduction which crashes in with guns blazing against the hallowed literary establishment, the stories in this collection are translated with such riveting, bawdy, hilarious, smelly, violent, Pinoy force that we are almost led to believe, once again, in the glorious possibility of translation.”
—Ramon Guillermo, author of Ang Makina ni Mang Turing and Translation & Revolution
“A dazzling collection of new stories originally written in Filipino, Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Waray, Ilocano, Kinaray-a, and Akeanon . . . . This landmark anthology presents an alternative canon . . . distinctly Filipino in its temperament and consciousness, but happily accessible to the rest of the world.”
—Jaime An Lim, author of The Axolotl Colony, Hedonicus, and Literature and Politics
“These stories are populated with non-humans—animals, insects, shapeshifting aswangs—and the no-longer human—dismembered bodies, spirits, saints, voices on tapes—and through them we are brought to a Filipino ulirát of what humans mostly suffer.”
—Edgar Calabia Samar, author of the Janus Silang series of books and Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog
“Lyrical and gritty, myth-infused and naturalistic, horrific and tender . . . . A must-read for anyone interested in the quotidian travails and wondrous metamorphoses undergone by denizens of a haunted republic in a haunted world.”
—Caroline S. Hau, author of Demigods and Monsters, Tiempo Muerto, and Necessary Fictions
"Sublime moments of discovery and connection, shadowed by horrifying historical backdrops, are what Ulirát offers on virtually every page. . . . The writers of Ulirát blend folklore with tropes from the Western canon and brutal colonial history. Layers of references to different times and colonial regimes stack like sediment, threatening to bury the verbal fun and games. There are no fairy-tale endings, just the effects of serial colonization and downstream capitalist economics. . . . In assembling a more comprehensive picture of Filipino consciousness, the collection proclaims the strength of the archipelago’s diversity of cultures and perspectives. Ulirát gives English readers an opportunity to pay attention."
—Necessary Fiction
"ULIRAT's context is full-frontally one of expanding literary landscape. . . . I found something of interest, charm, and/or wisdom in all [the stories]. . . . I appreciate ULIRAT because I appreciate how it's making lemonade from the lemon that is colonialism by turning the previously-enforced language of English into a gateway to bringing Filipino stories back to colonizers and rest of the world."
—Eileen Tabios, The Halo-Halo Review
"Ulirát has virtually everything you might want in an anthology of short fiction: a wide spectrum of authorial voices, thematic concerns, and tones ranging from realism to the uncanny. But the anthology also manages the impressive feat of feeling like a solid survey while also working as a consistent whole."
—Words Without Borders, selected for The Watchlist, March 2021
"The book offers a dynamic snapshot of Philippine letters."
—Poets & Writers, selected for "The Anthologist: A Compendium of Uncommon Collections"