Like any would-be symbologists, readers encountering the cover of Dan Brown’s newest novel “Inferno: A Novel” (Doubleday, New York, 2013, 463 pages) for the first time should examine its elements.
Like the elements of her art and the travails of the comic strip hero she shares a moniker with, Tintin Pantoja has been all over the map. Born in Manila, raised in Indonesia and educated in the United States, this 33-year-old has achieved what many comic book artists consider to be the dream of a lifetime: being published internationally.
Impending death is easily one of the hardest subjects to write about, especially if the writer is still young and has so much to lose.
Because of the unusual way he wields his words, Paulo Coelho is perhaps the world’s most quotable novelist.
All families have their secrets, but in fiction, the wealthier and more powerful the family, the more secrets they keep. Make it a wealthy, fictional Filipino family, then you will have secrets that will inevitably come back to change everything.
On their own, radio and books represent traditionally powerful forms of media for Filipinos. Put them together, and you have a potent mix indeed.
Peter Mayle may just be the unlikeliest writer of suspense novels. Though born in Britain, Mayle is best known for the years he spent in the Provence, France, and 1989’s “A Year in Provence,” his food-and-wine-heavy memoir. Since then, Mayle has been writing sequels to “Provence” and novels also set in the South of France.
Beginning with the title, the book is immediately eye-catching and unusual. “Startle: Gathering Light from the Word of God” by José Ramon “Fr. Jett” T. Villarin, SJ (Jesuit Communications Foundation, Inc., Quezon City, 2012, 199 pages), gathers Villarin’s written reflections on the Sunday Gospel and, in a fine sampling of the book’s language and logic, explains itself.
She drove everyone mad. British novelist Hilary Mantel, it turned out, was not shy regarding her thoughts about British royalty.
Of all the controlling regimes ruling over the many dystopias in young adult (YA) fiction, the most all-encompassing is not The Capitol from Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games,” but instead the ominously-named Society from Ally Condie’s “Matched” trilogy.
Like a tragic twist straight out of one of his books, Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson died in 2004 at the age of 50 without witnessing his three novels in the “Millennium” series fascinating readers around the world. The books’ coldly graphic and hypnotic portrayal of snow, sex, violence and motive enthralled readers who had never seen anything like it before. Larsson’s death also meant that these readers would no longer have any Lisbeth Salander books to read once they finished the trilogy.
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