mababang langit

i just finished listening to the random house-produced audiobook of andy mulligan's novel trash ,  a YA crime caper about three young boys living in a smokey mountain-type giant dumpsite in a thinly veiled fictional version of the philippines, and the very important thing they find one day while  sorting the endless piles of trash. the audiobook itself was a bit of a disaster: one of the voice talents actually managed to sound reasonably like a filipino speaking english, but another, who voiced a major character and narrated many of the climactic scenes, sounded like a ten year-old attempting a borat impression. no, really, it was that bad. the story itself was highly enjoyable and reasonably well-plotted (if you don't look too closely, and a local would scrutinize the heck out of it), if a bit fanciful and heavy on the exoticism at times. i liked the nice little set pieces mulligan lines up, and i came to really care for the three protagonists, dumb accent and all. bu...

kwentillion is summit publishing's attempt to kick-start a nonexistent local YA readers' market by offering a mix of comics, short fiction, and articles aimed at young readers. that's a heck of a daunting task that editors paolo chikiamco and budjette tan have set themselves to, but then these two know what it's like to build readerships where no one believed one could exist before. tan was instrumental in the 90's indie komiks movement, later parlaying that popularity into the crossover success that is trese, and chikiamco has championed pinoy sci-fi through his rocket kapre imprint. going back to the first issue: it is excellent. the comics alone are worth the cover price, and seeing them for the first time in full-size print is a joy. there are four stories in all: the last datu 's short-haired, dagger-wielding, aswang-fighting heroine (alexandra trese precursor, anyone? ) is out to assassinate the head of the aswang tribe that massacred her people. s...

remember james frey, that a million little pieces novelist who duped oprah? he's set up full fathom five, a "fiction factory" composed of young writers trying to create the next twilight . what could possibly be wrong with that? well... a number of things. nymag.com has the dirt. Frey emphasized that this was collaboration—not my own project—and that he needed writers who will listen to him. He gave as an example a King Arthur adaptation he was working on with another writer. That author had listened to his criticism and rewritten it in a different voice; because the author was receptive, Frey was positive the book would sell, and big. Another project, a Gossip Girl–like series he had worked on with two writers employed at Star magazine, he said had gone south. The writers hadn’t made his requested character changes, so Frey had recently fired them. He reintroduced the idea that he was modeling his company on Damien Hirst’s art factory, a warehouse in which a report...