Leche

A young Filipino American’s riotous adventures through the sprawling, tragicomic landscape of modern-day Manila.

After thirteen years of living in the U.S., Vince returns to his birthplace, the Philippines. As Vince ventures into the heat and chaos of the city, he encounters a motley cast of characters, including a renegade nun, a political film director, arrogant hustlers, and the country’s spotlight-driven First Daughter. Haunted by his childhood memories and a troubled family history, Vince unravels the turmoil, beauty, and despair of a life caught between a fractured past and a precarious future.

Witty and mesmerizing, this novel explores the complex colonial and cultural history of the Philippines and the paradoxes inherent in the search for both personal and national identities.

Publication date: April 12, 2011

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.9 x 8.9

Page count: 280 pages

ISBN: 9781566892544

Poet, novelist, and playwright R. Zamora Linmark is the author of the best-selling novel Rolling the R’s (Kaya Press) and three collections of poetry, Prime Time Apparitions, The Evolution of a Sigh, and Drive By Vigils, all from Hanging Loose Press. A recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including two from the Fulbright Foundation, a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, he has published in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S. and the Philippines. His stage adaptation of Rolling the R’s premiered in Honolulu in 2008 to critical and commercial success. Linmark divides his time between Manila and Honolulu.

A Publishers Weekly Top 100 Book of 2011

“Linmark’s novel reads like a bittersweet love letter to a vast and perplexing nation. This is a story of heritage, sexuality, and self-discovery that is as riveting as its locale is complex.”

—Booklist

“As quirky and funny as its oddball characters, Linmark’s latest is a unique, colorful portrait of cross-cultural experience and a view into the complexities of modern-day Philippines through the prism of an ex-pat’s self-discovery and quasi-homecoming.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Uproariously funny . . . Above all, Linmark’s writing is literary: heightened, emotional and beautifully crafted.”

—The Honolulu Star Advertiser

“A whirlwind, whistle stop tour of Manila’s high society, celebrity pop culture and seedy underbelly.”

—Bookmunch

“This is a language—and a Manila—that should be familiar to readers of the Asian American canon, and Leche feels like the long-awaited completion of something we didn’t know was incomplete.”

—Hyphen

“R. Zamora Linmark writes with the incandescent irreverence of a papal heretic, with the poetic and chaotic sense that only the Philippines can bestow, with the language of a sainted seer all held together with an elegant craft and a graceful style.”

—Chris Abani, author of GraceLand

“Eye opening, hilarious, and relentlessly seductive, Zamora Linmark holds the reader until the very last page.”

—Sabina Murray, author of Forgery and The Caprices