As part of our celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage month, City Lights presents
Gina Apostol in conversation with R. Zamora Linmark
City Lights celebrates the publication of
La Tercera, By Gina Apostol, published by Soho Books
In her first novel since Insurrecto, Gina Apostol assembles a vision of Philippine history from the 19th century to present day in the fragmented story of the Delgados, a family surviving across generations of colonization, catastrophe, and war.
Rosario Delgado, a Filipina novelist in New York City, learns of her mother’s death in the Philippines. Instead of rushing home, she puts off her return by embarking on an investigation into her family’s history and her mother’s supposed inheritance, a place called La Tercera, which may or may not exist. Rosario catalogs generations of family bequests and detritus: maps of uncertain purpose, rusted chicken coops, a secret journal, the words to songs sung at the family home during visits from Imelda Marcos.
Each life Rosario explores opens onto a multitude of other lives and raises a multitude of questions. But as the search for La Tercera becomes increasingly labyrinthine, Rosario’s mother and the entire Delgado family emerge in all their dizzying complexity: traitors and heroes, reactionaries and revolutionaries. Meanwhile, another narrative takes shape—of the country’s erased history of exploitation and slaughter at the hands of American occupying forces.
La Tercera is Gina Apostol’s most ambitious, personal, and encompassing novel—a story about the impossibility of capturing the truth of the past, and the terrible cost to a family, or a country, that fails to try.
Gina Apostol’s third book, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). She was writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy and a fellow at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy, among other fellowships. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.
R. Zamora Linmark is the author three novels Leche, Rolling the R’s, which he’d adapted for the stage, and, in 2019, The Importance of Being Wilde at Heart, his first novel for young adults. He also published four poetry collections, including The Evolution of a Sigh and, also in 2019, Pop Vérité. He is currently the Writer-In-Residence where he is at work on a novel and a poetry collection, and is editing an anthology of stories and poems in Hawaii Creole English.
What has been said of the work of Gina Apostol
“Stylish, meta-fictional, intelligent, kaleidoscopic, melodramatic, multi-generational, spiked with twisted Filipino puns and double entendres, and containing a book within a book within a book (because we never get just one book from an Apostol novel but two, sometimes three), La Tercera is a love letter from a daughter to her mother, and an urgent act of remembering that salvages the truth (or its remains) from the regimes that pursue its erasure.” –R. Zamora Linmark, author of Leche
“A feat of lavish storytelling, La Tercera reinvents the family epic to surface political exigencies and shadow histories with Apostol’s signature linguistic mischief, madcap humor, and earthy intelligence. This novel flashes with prismatic light.” –Tracy O’Neill, author of Quotients
This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation. To learn more visit: https://citylights.com/foundation/