PRESS RELEASE
PALH (Philippine American Literary House) has released award-winning Linda Ty-Casper’s novella, A Small Party in a Garden, Revised and Critical Edition. Referred to as a “novel of justice” this edition reintroduces this important historical fiction to a new generation of readers. First published almost forty years ago, A Small Party in a Garden is set in the Philippines during the Marcos Dictatorship. The story’s protagonist, a privileged woman who is the right-hand woman of Imelda Marcos, learns first-hand what brutality meant under Marcos’ Martial Law. This revised and critical edition includes an introduction by Dr. Charlie Samuya Veric (Professor at the Ateneo de Manila University), an article by Dr. Lynn M. Grow, (Emeritus Senior Professor of English at Broward College), and some past book reviews of Ty-Casper’s novella.
Linda Ty-Casper is the author of over sixteen books, which generally deal with Philippine historical and political themes. She is the recipient of the SEA Write Award, UNESCO/P.E.N., Rockefeller Bellagio, Radcliffe Fellowships and other awards. Her literary work is considered a significant contribution to Filipino, Philippine American, as well as Asian American literature. Her works of fiction are so powerful that two of her novels, Wings of Stone and Awaiting Trespass, were banned in the Philippines during the Marcos Dictatorship; the books were published in London.
Her recent books include the biography of her husband: Will You Happen, Past the Silence, Through the Dark: Remembering Leonard Ralph Casper, and Lives Remembered, A Memoir.
A
Small Party in a Garden: Revised and Critical Edition is easily available from Amazon, in book and digital
formats.
PRAISE:
Writing in 1993, five years after the novella A
Small Party in a Garden was first published in 1988, NVM Gonzalez defined
what he called the novel of justice. “Living in the milieu of postcolonial and
neocolonial societies,” he wrote, “we tend to forget that imperialism dies
hard.” Heavy is the burden of the Filipino writer, Gonzalez said, who must
write the novel of justice wherein “the writer configures a world out of life
and language derived from colonial or postcolonial milieu.” The duty is heavy
because the Filipino writer must invent “strategies of narration in order to
bring off the theme of oppression, the territory provided by their perceptions
of the workings of empire.” In A Small Party in a Garden, a milieu
exists to plumb the Filipino soul, spanning the horror, nightmare, and disgrace
of the choices we make on the long road to becoming free, to becoming
postcolonial at last. (From the Introduction) ~ Charlie Samuya
Veric, Ph.D, Director, Literary and Cultural Studies Program, Ateneo
de Manila University
The reader is entangled in a web of insights, impressions, emotions emerging
from the narrator’s memories of an earlier life fraught with internal and
external conflicts … and finally as she deviates from her normal daily routine
only to be plunged into a shocking turn of events which leaves the reader
stunned and shocked. But only the inimitable writer that is Linda Ty-Casper can
deliver all these in a fluid, rich language at times dense but smoothly
flowing, at other times sharp, pointed, clear, unforgiving. And the reader,
charmed, amused, intrigued, amazed, is irrevocably caught. ~ Thelma E.
Arambulo, Writer, Literary Studies Scholar, Former UP Chair of the Dept.
of English and Comparative Literature
Tags: #philippinebooks #filipinoliterature #filipinowriter #booksphilippines
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