Of That Other Country We Now Speak and Other Stories

A troubled father seeks to heal his daughter by confronting private and ancestral ghosts; a former priest regains his vocation by rescuing a woman from a sex cult; an unrequited lover uses a dog as his murder weapon; a corrupt banker seeks redemption among the prayerful inside a booze bar as the “end of the world” approaches—the denizens of Charlson Ong’s latest collection of short fiction inhabit a world fraying at the seams, morally adrift. Wounded and compromised they nonetheless struggle mightily against the “dying of the light.”
Written over the last two decades, these stories are thematically and stylistically diverse ranging from the exuberant title story to the “minimalist” “The Vet.” Here we find the gritty realism of crime fiction as well as the enchantment of myth. Here is fiction sensual and sophisticated, rich and robust. Here is fiction worthy of its calling.
Charlson Ong has published three collections of short fiction as well as three novels. He has won the National Book Award for both his short fiction and his novels.

About the Author

Charlson Ong has published three collections of short fiction: Men of the East and Other Stories, Woman of Amkaw and Other Stories, and Conversion and Other Fictions as well as three novels: An Embarrassment of Riches (which won the Philippine Centennial Literary Prize), Banyaga, A Song of War (which won the 2006 National Book Award), and Blue Angel, White Shadow (which won the 2011 National Book Award). He teaches Creative Writing at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, College of Arts and Letters, UP Diliman.