Interviews, Reviews, Etc

With Jessica Hagedorn, Alfian Sa'at, and Jeremy Tiang; moderated by Harold Augenbraum. Organized Jee Leong Koh of Singapore Literature Festival and Singapore Unbound.

July 2015; video; 11:27 minutes

Gina Apostol on Gun Dealers' Daughter and Narrative Voice

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan of AAWW interviewed me about the use of language, narrative, and structure in Gun Dealers' Daughter. Thanks, Rowan and Asian American Writers' Workshop.

October 2013; video published August 2014

2013 PEN America Awards

The video presents the entire awards ceremony; my speech is at 32:26.

May 2014

Author Interview

Oral interview by Bookmarked, a blog

May 1, 2014

Spot.Ph: Ten Questions for Filipino Novelist

Interview by Nerissa Balce

April 21, 2014

Philippine Daily Inquirer: Philippine Novelist Wins US Book Award amid Cancer and Yolanda

Interview by Ruey De Vera

March 21, 2014

Five Qs with Gina Apostol

Interview by writinglikeanasian

October 2013

Riffle Books: Backstory Q&A

Interview by Amy Brinker

September 19, 2013

Hyphen Magazine

Interview by Laurel Fantauzzo

June 3, 2013

Manila Noir, Asia Society

Complete panel discussion, with Jessica Hagedorn, Sabina Murray, Gina Apostol and filmmaker Ron Morales. Allan Isaac, moderator.

October 18, 2012

The Recorder: "Memory is Deception"

Interview by Trish Crapo

August 30, 2012

Giant Robot: Q&A

Interview by Ed Lin

July 2012

Bookslut, Gun Dealers' Daughter

Interview by Denise Scarfi

July 10, 2012

WCVB Cityline, Gun Dealers' Daughter

Television interview by Karen Holmes

2010

Kritika Kultura 15, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata

Interview by Daryll Delgado

May 6, 2020

Katie da Cunha-Lewin reviews Insurrecto in Splice (UK). "Cut, Cut, Cut!" ..."When a novelist like Apostol writes of an imagined film, the questions she raises are about both aesthetic form and possibility.

'Imaginary films', as Massimo Fusillo writes, 'are a part of a broader fascination with the realm of the potential'. Although the work of cinema depicted by Apostol may be an amalgam of other films...its existence lies purely in language: its visual power becomes possible only with the input of the reader..."

March 25, 2020

Stephen Poland in medium.com cites Insurrecto to talk about intriguing postcolonial/anti-imperialist critical readings of the t.v. show Westworld. (I admit, I like interdisciplinary, multi-genre theses like this.)

December 20, 2019

The Paris Review Staff's Favorite Reads of 2019. "Gina Apostol’s brilliant Insurrecto deconstructs plot to critique the white gaze in art and ask important questions concerning just who is telling the story."

December 2019

Delightful Diversions and Holiday Drinks.

"Insurrecto will make you think and ask questions about representation and identity. Enjoy this layered cocktail as you discover the culture clash in this novel.

Insurrecto

Stir in a mixing glass serve up with a dehydrated mandarin wheel garnish

(2019 @ The Cabinet, NYC)

December 5, 2019

From Insurrecto to the Bambook Stalk: 12 must-read Filipino stories. List by James Gabrillo in The National (Abu Dhabi).

December 2, 2019

Mairead Small Staid on Insurrecto in Jezebel.

August 28, 2019

Tash Aw reviews Insurrecto in The Guardian.

August 11, 2019

Philippine Star: "Two Novelists Revisit Apocalpypse Now."

July 25, 2019

Arvyn Cerezo at Bookriot: "Five Must-Reads of Philippine Literature."

May 7, 2019

NYT T-Magazine: "Why Are We Living in a Golden Age of Historical Fiction?"

May 7, 2019

Review of Insurrecto by F. Sionil Jose.

May 1, 2019

Kendra Winchester on Insurrecto in Lithub. "Reading Women: What to Read for Asian Pacific Heritage Month."

May 1, 2019

NBC's "Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Reading List."

May 1, 2019

BosFilipinos: "Buried Histories: Historical Books and Memoirs About Life in the Philippines"

April 3, 2019

Bookseller reports: Fitzcarraldo Editions buys Insurrecto rights for UK/Commonwealth.

March 1, 2019

King County Library system: These are the 5 books you should read for Women's History Month.

February 11, 2019

Ruel De Vera in Philippine Daily Inquirer.

February 7, 2019

Jen Mediano in Public Seminars. "A Place of Grief and Revolution."

February 4, 2019

Serena Kim in Character Media. "A Bitingly Vicious...Romp Through...History."

January 17, 2019

Eileen Tabios in FilAmnet. "A touch of humor in Insurrecto."

December 30, 2018

Jen McDonald in New York Times: "Apostol is a magician with language (think Borges, think Nabokov)..."

December 27, 2018

Bookscrolling: Best Fiction Books of 2018—Year-End List Aggregation.

December 13, 2018

Cecily Saller in Dallas News. "A beautifully bewildering, time-bending tale of US-Philippine history."

December 7, 2018

Buzzfeed News: This is The Best Fiction of 2018.

December 6, 2018

Anthony Domestico in Boston Globe: A trippy, cinematic novel of American atrocity in the Philippines.

December 6, 2018

Rigoberto Gonzalez in Los Angeles Times: Narratives and History Collide in Gina Apostol's Stunning Insurrecto.

December 6, 2018

Peter Gordon in Asian Review of Books calls Insurrecto "the literary equivalent of pinball."

December 3, 2018

Fiction Advocate's Ten Best Books of 2018.

November 28, 2018

Fresh Air's John Powers reviews Insurrecto on NPR. Witty And Stylish, 'Insurrecto' Offers An Inside View Of The Pain Of Colonization.

November 16, 2018

Booklist Reader. Five More to Go: Gina Apostol's Insurrecto; via Smithsonian's BookDragon.

November 15, 2018

Self Magazine's 21 Best Books to Buy in 2018.

November 15, 2018

Casper Star-Tribune: Book Tells Differing Stories of the Bloody Bells of Balangiga

November 12, 2018

The Morning News Tournament of Books Longlist for 2019.

November 6, 2018

Refinery29 Best Books to Read

November 1, 2018

Entertainment Weekly's 20 Books to Read in November: "Apostol interrogates the traumatic, mostly forgotten U.S.-Philippines War in this dazzling two-hander, following an American filmmaker and a Filipino translator on a road trip as they clash on matters of art and genocide. What results is a tender character study erupting with blazing insights on the ethics of storytelling."

October 24, 2018

Win a Book Wednesday, Arlington Public Library: "always compulsively readable."

October 15, 2018

Insurrecto, Booklist Starred Review

September 26, 2018

Publishers Weekly's Best Books Issue (cover author)

September 3, 2018

Insurrecto, Publishers' Weekly Starred Review

September 1, 2018

Insurrecto, Kirkus Review

August 31, 2018

Buzzfeed: These Are the Best Books of Fall

July 17, 2018

The Millions: Most Anticipated Books of the Second Half of 2018

March 12, 2018

Filipino Food Finds a Place...

By Ligaya Mishan.

I just like that Ligaya Mishan quoted me. "Of all Filipino dishes, adobo 'has the most leeway for a cook’s imagination, hubris, art or bigoted sense of one’s own mother’s love-and-greatness,' the novelist Gina Apostol said..." :)

August 15, 2016

8 Philippine Novels that would make awesome movies

Philippine comment: RJ Firmeza on Gun Dealers' Daughter

"Gina Apostol weaves a poignant novel about Sol, a rich girl turned Communist rebel. Apostol delivers a mesmerizing account of the ruling class using the clouded youthful lens of Sol as it shows a glimpse of the revolution during the Marcos era. The richness of the topic alone would make a film version as absorbing as the book."

December 16, 2015

A Kind of Compass: "The Unintended" by Gina Apostol (these excerpts are early versions of Insurrecto)

David Hebblethwaite writes a book blog, David's Book World. "This cracker of a story appears in A Kind of Compass, a new anthology of “stories on distance” edited by Belinda McKeon and published by Dublin-based Tramp Press. ...I was sold on the story from that opening paragraph, to be honest...

And so it continues, layer on layer.

There are other types of distance in ‘The Unintended’: between Chiara and her parents; between the beginning and end of her parents’ relationship; between Magsalin and Chiara – and between reader and event, because all we have in the end is a broken-up narrative filtered through the viewpoint (perhaps even in part written by) Magsalin. Distance all the way down. One thing I do know: I need to read more of Gina Apostol’s work."

October 3, 2015

Comments on The Unintended in Irish Times (these excerpts are early versions of Insurrecto)

Review of anthology, A Kind of Compass, edited by Belinda McKeon and published by Tramp Press. Excerpts from The Unintended are anthologized in the collection. "Gina Apostol’s 'The Unintended' is the first example of something truly remarkable. It appears as a series of fragments – of letters, memories, stories – but Apostol never loses hold of the mood, which is nostalgic, gilded even, but poisonous too. On the surface of things, the daughter of an Italian film director hires a Filipino mystery writer to be her translator and guide as she makes a film of her own, literally and artistically following in her father’s footsteps. Memories of her mother break through the narrative arc, interrupting it, almost abstracting it. Such a summary rings hollow; the story’s richness is in the way it moves elegantly around, from the faded light of old, almost aristocratic cinema – great men at work, revolution in the air – to a modern day that is more stark, somehow unyielding in its cold reality. It’s a romantic patchwork of sound, colour and tone, and it electrifies the book."

n.d.

The Map is Not, an essay on Borges by Jonathan Basile

This has nothing to do with me (it is about Borges and maps), but I loved the reference to the essay, "Borges, Politics, and the Postcolonial" here. I love the way he reuses it for his own purposes to make a point that adds to a way for "an endless re-reading of [Borges's] work"—

..."In this respect, the brilliant analysis of postcolonial themes in Borges’ stories by Gina Apostol provides the matrix for an endless re-reading of his work, one which transforms this piece as well. In “Borges, Politics, and the Postcolonial,” she describes the postcolonial condition as that of finding oneself living within another’s fantasy, dream, or text, an almost universal condition for Borges’ protagonists. ...

[n.d.]

War, Literature & the Arts: "War in the Filipino Imagination: Filipino Writers in the United States Wrestling with the Minotaur"

Essay by Epifanio San Juan. "Only perhaps in Apostol’s Gun-Dealer’s Daughter and the Mayi Theater’s plays (collected in Savage Stage) do we encounter a less exhibitionistic and more ethically committed grappling with the moral and political issues of colonial war and its offshoot in civil war in the neocolony....In Apostol’s novel, the killing of the American Colonel Grier testifies to the rearticulation of war as a deadly game conforming to Clausewitz’s instrumentalist view. In 1981, a CIA officer advising the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) was killed by urban guerillas; while earlier, in 1974, three US Navy officers were gunned down in Subic Naval Base by suspected leftists (Jones 247). However, the theme of revenge and its ambiguous repercussions in Apostol’s fiction complicates the picture. Whose will is being imposed on whom, remains blurred since the enormity of destruction resulting from secret government maneuvers eludes the traumatized psyche of the central protagonist, the mentally unhinged narrator of the novel: …"

November 5, 2014

Book Review Manila Noir

Outrageous-Writer reviews Manila Noir. (pretty amusing). DEAD LINK.

Sept 11, 2014

Last Night's Reading Drawing

A drawing of a reading from Gun Dealers' Daughter at Word Bookstore, NJ.

June 18, 2014

5 Pinay Stellar Novels You Need to Read

Comments on Gun Dealers' Daughter on Pinay.com (Philippine review)

June 2, 2014

A Matter of Apostrophes

Juaniyo Arcellana in Philippine Star

on Gun Dealers' Daughter: "More than anything, however, Gun Dealers' Daughter is a tale of friendship, and how faithful companionship transcends and outlasts any ideology. One can read it in the lingering detailed descriptions that are Apostol's stock in trade, the clever repartee between the main characters and even the minor ones. The fine unmitigated sense of irony and delicate humor leave no doubt the author is firmly in control. In gist this is the writer's craft: control and irony, and the no-man's land between...Gun Dealers' Daughter [tells us] that the revolution not only devours the innocent but that no one is safe in the fallout of our collective apathies...we might be wise...to heed it..."

and on Revolution According to Raymundo Mata:

"Trust Apostol to take the novel where it hasn't gone before..."

May 6, 2014

William Saroyan International Prize Shortlist

Gun Dealers' Daughter is nominated for the 2014 Saroyan International Prize.

April 26, 2014

Manila Bulletin: "The Write Stuff"

Newsfeature by Ronald Lim

November 1, 2013

Bookviews

Review of Gun Dealers' Daughter by Alan Caruba

October 5, 2013

In Lieu of a Field Guide

Blog post, review of Manila Noir by booktrek

October 2013

Manila Noir contributor named a recipient of Pen Open Book Award

Akashic Books news

October 20, 2013

"What I'm Reading Now" by Cyrus Cassells

Cyrus Cassells talks to Drunken Boat about Gun Dealers' Daughter

October 2013

PEN Open Book Award citation

"You will read Gun Dealers’ Daughter wondering where Gina Apostol novels have been all these years (in the Philippines, it turns out). You will feel sure (and you will be correct) that you have discovered a great fiction writer in the midst of making literary history. Gun Dealers’ Daughter is a story of young people who rebel against their parents, have sex with the wrong people, and betray those they should be most loyal to. At its essence this is a coming of age novel, albeit one where rebellion is part of a national revolution and where sex with another girl’s boyfriend leads to assassination. This is coming of age in the 1980s, Philippine dictatorship style, where college students are killed for their activism. The telling is fractured, as are the times. The reveal of information happens in a nonlinear manner, reflective of the mental breakdown suffered by the main character, Sol. We flip between Manila, where Sol is in school, and New York, where she goes to escape the madness that she has done and that has been done to her. Through this novel we see how fiction can scrape out a future, demand a re-look at the past—it is a reckoning kind of book. Not only does this novel make an argument for social revolution, it makes an argument for the role of literature in revolution—the argument being that literature can be revolution."

July/August 2013

American Book Review: "Revolution from Above"

Review by Martin Joseph Ponce of Gun Dealers' Daughter

"Gun Dealers’ Daughter marks Apostol’s U.S. debut and carries forward the combination of literary play (punning and allusion, metafictional reflexivity and humor) with historical reconstruction and political irreverence featured in her previous novels, Bibliolepsy (1997) and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata (2009)..."

May 26, 2013

The Politics of Remembering

Blog post, review of Gun Dealers' Daughter by stillthehellkitten DEAD LINK

April 14, 2013

Revolutions and their Children

Review by Luis Francia in Philippine Inquirer

March 20, 2013

Positively Filipino: "Rebels from the Ruling Class"

Review by Benjamin Pimentel

March 1, 2013

"I Want to Know the Whole Story: Eight Filipino Fictionists Everyone Should Read"

Column by Luis Katigbak in Philippine Star

"Apostol's writing is marked by a fierce intelligence, uncommonly delicious language, and a dark undercurrent of humor. As others have observed, she is a master of delineating the personal with the political, and how they are inextricably entwined. Also—and this is no small feat—she seems incapable of writing an unimpressive sentence."

December 12, 2012

Public Books: "Revolution Amnesia"

Review by Paul Nadal of Gun Dealers' Daughter

"...Sol’s 'mad, syllabic combinations' and “sudden dysgraphic bouts” become both traps and clues in this psychological thriller. The result is a stunning and lyrical word-portrait of a 'martial-law baby' whose story of teenage romance and rebellion allows Apostol to braid together a wider set of issues: memory, history, language, nationalism, exile, and revolution. These may be familiar themes in postcolonial fiction and Philippine literature, but they gain a renewed significance in Apostol’s hands. By routing the narrative through Sol’s mind, Apostol furnishes an ironic, often satiric, frame for looking at the retinue who profited from the US military–backed Marcos dictatorship. This is history from above—atop the mansions of Manila’s wealthiest neighborhoods and inside the wrecked psychology of 'a spoiled brat [with] a split soul.' Surprisingly, the unlikely vantage point of Manila’s highest class strata enables Apostol to present a profound critique of this period in contemporary Philippine history."

November 19, 2012

L.A. Review of Books: "Empire at the End of Time"

Review by Brian Collins of Gun Dealers' Daughter

"In her brilliant new novel and American debut, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Filipino writer Gina Apostol creates one of the most compelling characters in recent fiction: Soledad Soliman, daughter of a wealthy arms merchant during the Marcos years, useful fool and maybe worse....It’s as deft a sketch as something from Fitzgerald, and the happy accident of the able storyteller is contrived with so much greater grace than in too many new books...What can’t be conveyed as well with an excerpt or two is the unusually close relationship between the personal and the political here — not the foreground and background of a period piece, nor even the intersecting lines of the canonical historical novel, but something more like dialectical counterparts, where the one is well-nigh unthinkable without the other, something Frederic Jameson posited as characteristic of third world literature more generally...There is a clue for Gramscian readers who might otherwise find themselves wondering about the fatalism of the novel’s end...I’m thinking of the scene where doting Uncle Gianni, who never visits Soledad without bringing her some gift, hands her a book by the great Marxist philosopher. It’s an arresting moment...The period Apostol is writing about in Gun Dealers’ Daughter is yet another dumbfounding example of this politics of transformismo, whereby, in Perry Anderson’s words, “radical pressures are gradually absorbed and inverted by conservative forces, until they serve the opposite of their original ends...” Only when the repercussions of Marcos’s 30-year tyranny threatened the Filipino oligarchy itself was he driven from power, leaving the opposition to settle for neocolonialism with a different face or a death squad. And so while her comrades end up body parts on the killing fields, Soledad serves out an equally dark fate as a latter day Bertha, the mad prisoner of gothic privilege. If all this seems rather distant from the here and now, one only has to reflect on how our own political institutions have kept us from reckoning with the root causes of the current crisis...Apostol has given us a tour de force tale about late-20th-century Manila, but Gun Dealers’ Daughter is also a book for our times."

November 1, 2012

Hyphen Magazine: "A Casual Revolutionary"

Review by Jee Yoon Lee of Gun Dealers' Daughter

September 9, 2012

PopMatters: "A Fever Dream of Would-Be Activism"

Review by David Maine of Gun Dealers' Daughter

August 29, 2012

Straight.com: "Gun Dealers' Daughter Examines Revolt of Young and Rich"

Review by David Chau of Gun Dealers' Daughter

August 17, 2012

Counterpunch: "Students Dabbling in Revolution"

Review by Charles R. Larson of Gun Dealers' Daughter

July 13, 2012

Shelf-Awareness, Gun Dealers' Daughter

Review by Kerry McHugh

July 9, 2012

The Daily Beast: "This Week's Hot Reads"

Review by Jimmy So of Gun Dealers' Daughter

May 1, 2012

Library Journal, Gun Dealers' Daughter

Review by Ashanti L. White

April 20, 2012

Commentary Magazine, Gun Dealers' Daughter

Summer reading list of D.G. Myers

May 7, 2012

Publishers' Weekly, Gun Dealers' Daughter

First review of Gun Dealers' Daughter

December 8, 2011

Filipino Novels in 99 Words

Philippine review: Comment by Edgar Calabria Samar on

The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata

"Invoke Rizal & narrative postmodernity and you’ll have a rewriting of history & hilarity that is often only possible in a novel. Here: the novel as a book is foregrounded; issues of language, translation & textuality move the plot forward via competing interpretations; names & varying points of view present moments of irony; and anachronisms play with truth & meaning. Here is an archive of a revolution based on recollections, collations & annotations of one person’s blindness. Here is a novel about how Rizal is read, interpreted & plagiarized: the highlight is its use of his unfinished novel Aftermass."

and Bibliolepsy

"Here is a novel that is openly in love with words. The narrator is Primi Peregrino, who at age 4 went over the twenty-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary with her older sister Anna. The book is Primi’s personal history of reading, where the canon is mixed with popular texts; memories of childhood run as synchronic dichotomies of places & books; & other authors, books & imagined characters resonate emotional turning points. The prose here reads like poetry, & the latter half of the book dealt considerably with poetry & poets—their tragedy & hopes, disillusions & madness."

January 20, 2011

Chronicles (blog)

Review of The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata

November 13, 2010

Philippine National Book Awards citation: Juan Laya Prize for the Novel

"Gina Apostol tells our revolutionary history – or fragments of our history – using a pastiche of writing from the academe, a diary, stories within stories, jokes, puns, allusions, a virtual firecracker of words. Her novel is fearlessly intellectual, anchored firmly on the theories of Jacques Lacan. But it is also funny and witty as it picks – lice, nits, and all – on the hoaxes in our history. It affirms, if it still needs to be affirmed, the power of fiction to shape and reshape the gaps in the narratives of our history as a nation. The main character here is History, and its protagonist, Imagination. For this audacious sword-play of a novel, the National Book Award is given to Gina Apostol’s The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata."

February 2010

Nino Soria de Veyra: "History in Footnotes"

Philippine review: Note by Nino Soria de Veyra on The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata

"...For Raymundo Mata is a footnote in the annals of the Katipunan, the Philippine revolutionary group that fought for independence against Spain and later America. He is mentioned only in passing...But Gina Apostol recuperates this character in her recent novel, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. She lets Raymundo Mata speak for himself through what is purported to be his notebooks or, as the historian Estrella Espejo describes it, more of 'an assortment of unpaginated notes and mismatched sheaves packed in a ratty biscuit tin and stuffed in a tattered medical bag, the edges of the papers curled up in permanent dust' (2).... This ...contentious scholarship is what Apostol mimes and mines in her own explorations into the Filipino identity. And what a rollicking heteroglossic carnival she presents us readers..."

December 27, 2009

Philippine Star: "A Rich Harvest of Books"

Comments by F. Sionil Jose on The Revoluton According to Raymundo Mata DEAD LINK

September 30, 2002

Philippine Daily Inquirer: "A Love Story—of Sorts"

Review by Luis Katigbak of Bibliolepsy

"For those of us who have gotten down on our hands and knees to thoroughly search bargain book bins—from the clean and well-lit to the downright grimy, from Morato to Recto—we will find our fervor echoed in the character of pale bibiloleptic Primi, and find Bibliolepsy a dizzingly eloquent, slightly disturbing, but ultimately strangely comforting read."

1999

Philippine Studies, volume 47, no. 4

Review by Danton Remoto of Bibliolepsy

(originally in Philippine Star) "Other people write tomes that would be better off as doorstops. In 160 pages, Gina Apostol serves up Manila in the eighties: Swift, Swiftian, sexy, and sad."

October 7, 2019

Excerpt from Insurrecto

in The Arts Desk (UK)

July 11, 2019

Excerpt from Insurrecto

in Granta Magazine

January 17, 2018

Francine Prose's Problem

How to read postcolonially, published in Los Angeles Review of Books

January 12, 2018

NYT Op-Ed: Who Hits Golf Balls into the Sea

Class, history, and golf balls at the beach

May 19, 2017

NYT Op-Ed: Speaking in Fascism's Tongues

How shifts in language mark fascism

April 17, 2017

Foreword to Nick Joaquin on Fiction Advocate

My foreword to the Penguin Classics edition of Nick Joaquin, Woman Who Had Two Navels and Other Tales of the Tropical Gothic.

October 14, 2016

Duterte and Philippine Revolutionary History

I was troubled by Philippine president Duterte's remarks on the Filipino-American war, so I wrote this op-ed for CNN Philippines.

2016

On Gun Dealers' Daughter

I spoke about writing Gun Dealers' Daughter at Summer Forum, a sharp, lovely group of artists and thinkers who go on retreats in order to think slowly and communally about world issues. This Summer Forum retreat was at Joshua Tree (a first for me—never been to the Mojave). My talk is published in their journal Dilettante—it is the second piece in the collection, which is available free on pdf.

May 9, 2016

Duterte: Strongman, Jokerman

Op-Ed in CNN Philippines on the 2016 Philippine presidential elections winner, President Rodrigo Duterte.

October 27, 2015

Cornell University Lecture

I lectured on "The Filipino-American War and the Writing of a Novel." Cornell has it on Cornell cast, link above.

December 2, 2014

"Dancing with Dictators"

An essay on David Byrne's play Here Lies Love in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

July 2, 2014

Overdetermined

A post on the 2014 World Cup in the blog by Noel Shaw, Eric Gamalinda, and Ubaldo Stecconi, tickytocka.tumblr.com