Gina Apostol’s (CRF 2009) novel Bibliolepsy, first released in the Philippines in 1997, was published in the US on January 4th.
The author says: “I began this book when I was nineteen: the year Ninoy Aquino was murdered on the tarmac by Imelda Marcos’s goons. In a weird loop, a circular pattern that mocks my own work’s ways of shaping time, this book, my first novel, is out two-times-nineteen years later—two times the length of my life when I began it. It marks the time I became a writer. To see it in print beyond its home… is for me a kind of grace… Bibliolepsy is about my wish to preserve ardor—the ardor I had for books the minute I learned to read. It’s about recalling the sense of that very first time.”
Apostol talks about Bibliolepsy with Neferti Tadiar at Vromans on Jan 6, with Zack Linmark at Literati on Jan 11, and with Malaka Gharib at City Lights Jan 18. You can read about the book from Publishers’ Weekly here, or from Soho Press here. Purchase Bibliolepsy here.Â