Mia Alvar. (2015). In the Country: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Mia Alvar. 2015. In the Country: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Mia Alvar, In the Country: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

Mia Alvar. In the Country: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

OverDrive Product Record

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1. • value: Teachers
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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Alvar, Mia
   • bioText: MIA ALVAR was born in Manila and grew up in Bahrain and New York City. Her work has appeared in One Story, The Missouri Review, FiveChapters, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Yaddo, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. A graduate of Harvard College and Columbia University, she lives in New York City.
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In these nine globe-trotting tales, Mia Alvar gives voice to the women and men of the Philippines and its diaspora.
From teachers to housemaids, from mothers to sons, Alvar’s stories explore the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined. In the Country speaks to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call home—and marks the arrival of a formidable new voice in literature.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Twists abound in Mia Alvar's debut collection. But Alvar's finely wrought shocks, delivered in exacting prose, reverberate without easy resolution. . . . Worlds continue to be upended as [her] characters move among the Philippines, the Persian Gulf and the United States. The Manila-born, New York-based author offers deft portraits of transnational wanderers, blessed and cursed with mobility. . . . Alvar's incursion into Filipino politics recalls Jessica Hagedorn's novel Dogeaters, and Miguel Syjuco's Ilustrado. . . Clearly a writer with enchanting powers, Alvar wills us to crisscross the globe with [her characters] all over again."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Chicago Tribune
   • content: "Compulsively readable . . . thanks to Alvar's expansiveness and her gift for grounded, human-scale metaphors. . . . Each of In the Country's nine stories about the Filipino diaspora has the satisfying heft of a little novel. In precise and patient prose, Alvar reveals the complex patterns of labor migration that structure and define her characters' most intimate relationships."
3. • premium: False
   • source: San Francisco Chronicle
   • content: "A stunning debut--without ever getting overly sentimental, page after page of In the Country is laced with . . . revelatory, unflinching truth. . . . Mia Alvar comes out swinging for the fences in her powerful first story collection about the Filipino diaspora--often exiled even at home--and doesn't ever let up."
4. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times
   • content: "Remarkable. . . . Each of these nine stories is superb."
5. • premium: False
   • source: The Plain Dealer
   • content: "Haunting and powerful. . . . Extraordinarily adept and insightful. . . . [Alvar] moves gracefully among Philippine cultural iconography and Tagalog, Bahraini class structure, American anachronisms, shifting gender and sexuality, and political histories. . . . The title story, 'In the Country,' and the longish 'Old Girl' stand out as evidence of Alvar's sensitive gaze, literary talent and polycultural dexterity. . . . Alvar is gifted; of that there is no doubt. And she has important things to say. She knows how to make the reader pause, and think deeply, feel. And hunger, as I am already, for more."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Entertainment Weekly
   • content: "Alvar's rich debut provides a deep and textured look at Filipino culture at home and abroad from an array of vastly diverse vantage points. . . . Through careful, delicate prose, Alvar reveals her characters' pasts and desires, which range from saintly to shameful in this deeply religious culture. . . . Alvar's characters are engaging and memorable, and their homes swell with visceral smells and sounds as she places us gently, firmly, into their imperfect lives."
7. • premium: False
   • source: O, The Oprah Magazine
   • content: "[An] accomplished debut of longing and redemption. In lush, sinuous sentences, Alvar probes the enduring stain of race, colonialism, and especially class, giving voice to all strata of Philippine society."
8. • premium: False
   • source: People
   • content: "Profound, trenchant short stories. . . . Alvar's displaced characters are buffeted by change and loss yet never stop trying to connect."
9. • premium: False
   • source: The Christian Science Monitor
   • content: "Superbly affecting. . . . Nine stories, all of them so smoothly and successfully realized that it seems incredible that this volume is [Alvar's] fiction debut. . . . [Her] speciality [is] the smart depiction of lives lived between two worlds. . . . [Alvar has] a range that would be the envy of authors with 10 books under their belts."
10. • premium: False
    • source: The Seattle Times
    • content: "Magnificent. . . . Debut story collections don't come much better than this. In the eight complex tales and one ambitious novella of In the Country, Filipina-American author Mia Alvar proves herself a tough, sophisticated writer with a canny empathy for the quandaries that confront her intricately layered characters."
11. • premium: False
    • source: The Miami New Times
    • content: "Perfect for anyone who thinks they can't get down with short stories. . . . While the subject matter is indeed fresh, the real appeal belongs to the lush sentences, rapid pacing, and morally conflicted characters. The last and title story is a novella-length tale that Alvar is reportedly using as fodder for a novel. We can only hope."
12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from March 9, 2015
      In this stunning debut collection, the yearnings of the characters resonate well beyond the page, and each story feels as rich, as deep, and as crafted as a novel. Equally impressive is the confident fluidity with which Alvar moves from Manila to Bahrain to Tokyo, from 1971 to 1986 to the 21st century. In “The Kontrabida,” Steve, a pharmacist in New York, returns home to the Philippines to visit his dying father with a highly regulated sedative to ease his father’s pain and, more so, his mother’s. Although his risky action creates tension, a deeper strain arises when he attempts to help out in his mother’s store and realizes he can’t follow even the simplest requests: “It was a way of shopping
      I had completely forgotten: egg by egg, cigarette by cigarette, people spending what they earned in a day to buy what they would use in the next.” In “The Miracle Worker,” Sally is a Filipina who’s accompanied her engineer husband to Bahrain and, making use of her skills as a special-education teacher, takes on a single student, a disabled girl from a very wealthy family, whose mother is rich enough to think she can “buy reality.” Throughout Alvar’s stories, the language is as elegant as it is durable, while the lines of class, race, gender, and history are both blurred and crystallized.

13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from April 15, 2015
      In this debut collection, Filipino students, teachers, activists, maids, and chauffeurs negotiate their lives under martial law at home and seek fortune abroad in the Middle East and New York. Each of these nine revelatory stories delivers characters who are equal parts endearing and disturbing. In the stunning "Esmeralda," a cleaning woman ponders her station in life as she dusts offices in the twin towers in the months preceding 9/11. "You lay there-Esmeralda, daughter of the dirt, born to toil in God's name till your hands or heart gave out-reclining like an infant or a queen, a hundred levels aboveground." In "A Contract Overseas," a budding fiction writer in the Philippines reveres her older brother despite his immoral, often dangerous behavior in Saudi Arabia. "I could picture him, reading my words somewhere, chuckling at my attempts to save some version of his life. Who could say, then, that I had an altogether lousy or inadequate imagination?" In the chilling "The Miracle Worker," a special education teacher befriends her student's family's maid-who, it turns out, has a dark side. "I had underestimated her: what looked like a lifetime of toil and taking orders had contained subversions that no one, until now, had seen." Alvar deftly flips the master-servant dynamic on its head. Her electric prose probes the tension between social classes, particularly in "Shadow Families," in which wealthy Filipina housewives in Bahrain throw parties for working-class Filipinos. "These katulong-'helpers, ' as we called them-were often younger but always aging faster than we were, over brooms and basins, their lungs fried with bleach and petroleum vapors....Helping these helpers, who'd traveled even farther, felt like home." A triumphant, singular collection deserving of every accolade it will likely receive.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from April 15, 2015
      

      Few writers, even the most seasoned, can produce collections of evenly superb stories. Alvar triumphs on her first try. Her nine stories reflect her own peripatetic background (Manila born, Bahrain/New York raised, Harvard/Columbia educated), featuring a cast of immigrants, expats, travelers, runaways, and returnees caught in constant motion--geographically, socioeconomically, politically, emotionally--as they search for respite and long for an elusive "home." A pharmacist returns to Manila with pain-relieving drugs for his once abusive, now-dying father and watches his mother continue to serve his every need. The appearance--and disappearance--of a glamorous young maid causes resonating distrust among Bahrain's Filipino expat community. An office cleaner rushes to the World Trade Center on 9/11, seeking her lover. A young writer is born, if only to keep her overseas brother alive forever. A middle-aged politician exiled to "Manilachusetts" trains for the Boston marathon. The titular final piece imbues the phrase "in the country" with tragic meaning as a nurse and a journalist struggle to survive the violent tumult of 1970s Philippines. VERDICT Both intrepid readers and armchair tourists eager to explore debut narratives that straddle multiple countries and cultures--a la Violet Kupersmith's The Frangipani Hotel or Rajesh Parameswaran's I Am an Executioner--will be opulently rewarded here.--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from June 1, 2015
      In these rich, layered short stories, Alvar gives voice to the immigrant experience of Filipinos. Living in Boston or New York City, the emigrants are still deeply tied to their native country, religiously sending back money and, in some cases, supporting whole villages as they toil in low-wage jobs and long for home. Hoping to ease his mother's burden, a man smuggles pain-killing drugs from his pharmacy in New York and brings them to Manila for his dying, abusive father, but what he learns about his mother's devotion upends his world. A special-education teacher living in Bahrain is paid handsomely to tutor a severely disabled young girl but soon realizes that her true mission is to deceive the student's mother about her child's bright future. In the title novella, a journalist and a nurse meet during a labor strike in Manila and marry, committing themselves to a life of activism only to discover that the country they've dedicated themselves to gave them everything and then took it away. These stories are stunning in their insight, compelling for their precise and nuanced detail, and provocative for the way they blur class lines.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

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From teachers to housemaids, from mothers to sons, Alvar’s stories explore the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined. In the Country speaks to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call home—and marks the arrival of a formidable new voice in literature.

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