Dogeaters
Patrick Rosal
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Description
“An original, raw, and wild novel that has held its power and demands to be read.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer
Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and Winner of the American Book Award
Jessica Hagedorn is the recipient of The Before Columbus Foundation’s 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award
A classic and influential story centered on the cultural and political stakes of life in Marcos-era Philippines
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Welcome to Manila in the turbulent period of the Philippines’ late dictator. It is a world in which American pop culture and local Filipino tradition mix flamboyantly, and gossip, storytelling, and extravagant behavior thrive.
A wildly disparate group of characters—including movie stars and waiters, a young junkie and the richest man in the Philippines—becomes ensnared in a spiral of events culminating in a beauty pageant, a film festival, and an assassination. At the center of this maelstrom is Rio, a feisty schoolgirl who will grow up to live in America and look back with longing on the land of her youth.
Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and Winner of the American Book Award
Jessica Hagedorn is the recipient of The Before Columbus Foundation’s 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award
A classic and influential story centered on the cultural and political stakes of life in Marcos-era Philippines
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Welcome to Manila in the turbulent period of the Philippines’ late dictator. It is a world in which American pop culture and local Filipino tradition mix flamboyantly, and gossip, storytelling, and extravagant behavior thrive.
A wildly disparate group of characters—including movie stars and waiters, a young junkie and the richest man in the Philippines—becomes ensnared in a spiral of events culminating in a beauty pageant, a film festival, and an assassination. At the center of this maelstrom is Rio, a feisty schoolgirl who will grow up to live in America and look back with longing on the land of her youth.
Product Details
| Publisher | Penguin Classics |
| Publish Date | November 12, 2024 |
| Pages | 288 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780143138167 |
| Dimensions | 7.7 X 5.1 X 0.5 inches | 0.4 pounds |
About the Author
Jessica Hagedorn was born and raised in the Philippines and came to the United States in her early teens. In San Francisco, Hagedorn was mentored by poet and translator Kenneth Rexroth, who edited Four Young Women, the anthology that first featured her poetry.
Her novels include Toxicology, Dream Jungle, The Gangster of Love, and Dogeaters, winner of the American Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award.
Hagedorn is also the author of Danger and Beauty, a collection of poetry and prose, and the editor of three anthologies: Manila Noir, Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction and Charlie Chan is Dead 2: At Home in the World.
Her theatrical work includes adaptations of Dogeaters and The Gangster of Love, and collaborations with Fabian Obispo (Felix Starro), Mark Bennett (Most Wanted), Campo Santo (Stairway To Heaven, Fe In The Desert), Han Ong (Airport Music), Robbie McCauley & Laurie Carlos (Teenytown), Urban Bushwomen (Heat), Blondell Cummings (The Art Of War/Nine Situations), Lawrence “Butch” Morris (Crayon Bondage), Michael Gregory Jackson (Mango Tango), and Ntozake Shange & Thulani Davis (Where The Mississippi Meets The Amazon).
Hagedorn wrote the screenplay for Fresh Kill, the newly restored feature film directed by Shu Lea Cheang. She wrote the scripts for the experimental animated series The Pink Palace, which was developed by Woo Art International.
From 1975-1985, Hagedorn led a band called The Gangster Choir. One of their signature songs, “Tenement Lover”, is part of John Giorno’s 1985 compilation album, A Diamond Hidden in the Mouth of a Corpse.
Jessica Hagedorn is the recipient of literary honors and awards including The Rome Prize for Literature, a Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship, a Philippine National Book Award, an American Book Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
Patrick Rosal is the author of five full-length poetry collections, including The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Scholars Program. His work has been honored by the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and the Association for Asian American Studies. He has read and performed at hundreds of venues, including the Lincoln Center, the Villa Cesar Chavez Apartments for agricultural workers, the Filipino Community Hall (Delano), and other sites spanning four continents. He is a professor of English at Rutgers University–Camden and serves as campus codirector of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice.
Her novels include Toxicology, Dream Jungle, The Gangster of Love, and Dogeaters, winner of the American Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award.
Hagedorn is also the author of Danger and Beauty, a collection of poetry and prose, and the editor of three anthologies: Manila Noir, Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction and Charlie Chan is Dead 2: At Home in the World.
Her theatrical work includes adaptations of Dogeaters and The Gangster of Love, and collaborations with Fabian Obispo (Felix Starro), Mark Bennett (Most Wanted), Campo Santo (Stairway To Heaven, Fe In The Desert), Han Ong (Airport Music), Robbie McCauley & Laurie Carlos (Teenytown), Urban Bushwomen (Heat), Blondell Cummings (The Art Of War/Nine Situations), Lawrence “Butch” Morris (Crayon Bondage), Michael Gregory Jackson (Mango Tango), and Ntozake Shange & Thulani Davis (Where The Mississippi Meets The Amazon).
Hagedorn wrote the screenplay for Fresh Kill, the newly restored feature film directed by Shu Lea Cheang. She wrote the scripts for the experimental animated series The Pink Palace, which was developed by Woo Art International.
From 1975-1985, Hagedorn led a band called The Gangster Choir. One of their signature songs, “Tenement Lover”, is part of John Giorno’s 1985 compilation album, A Diamond Hidden in the Mouth of a Corpse.
Jessica Hagedorn is the recipient of literary honors and awards including The Rome Prize for Literature, a Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship, a Philippine National Book Award, an American Book Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
Patrick Rosal is the author of five full-length poetry collections, including The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Scholars Program. His work has been honored by the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and the Association for Asian American Studies. He has read and performed at hundreds of venues, including the Lincoln Center, the Villa Cesar Chavez Apartments for agricultural workers, the Filipino Community Hall (Delano), and other sites spanning four continents. He is a professor of English at Rutgers University–Camden and serves as campus codirector of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice.
Reviews
Praise for Dogeaters:
“Hagedorn unwaveringly paints a menacing world, one that should sound an urgent alarm to us now—but the book is so beautiful! It’s painted in the shimmering, fierce, lush colors of memory and longing; it has the radiant evanescence of a dream—and it leaves behind the lingering authority of a dream’s veiled warning.”
—The New York Review of Books
“A surrealistically hip epic of Manila . . . Combines narrative drive with a lyric sensibility.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle
“As sharp and fast as a street boy’s razor . . . a rich small feast of a book.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Dogeaters erupts from its pages, 50 percent voluptuous fever dream, 50 percent heart-stopping nightmare, 100 percent reality. The hallucinatory vision of this colonial world—the crucible of the innocent, the rapacious, the collaborators, the oblivious, the martyred—feels flawless, irrefutable. Hagedorn writes with exhilarating stylistic dexterity, deep compassion, humor that ranges from gentle and affectionate to fire-breathing, and immense grace. The book is every bit as astonishing as it was when it first appeared thirty years ago, and unfortunately much more pertinent—a piercing warning signal, now that we have installed a deranged and brutal pseudo-populist dictator in our own country.”
—Deborah Eisenberg, author of Your Duck is My Duck
“Possibly the most brutally, hilariously accurate portrait of post-colonial Jamaica I’ve ever read. And it’s a novel about the Philippines.”
—Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf
“Unquestionably a classic, Dogeaters is a tour-de-force that remains as relevant and revelatory as it did when it first gut-punched the literary industry 30 years ago. Its restless prose, its collisions of peoples, cultures, and histories, and its resolute memory-keepers, such as Rio, have much left to say about our troubled times.”
—Rigoberto González, author of The Book of Ruin
“Jessica Hagedorn has been an inspiration to me for nearly thirty years, ever since I read Dogeaters. It is as remarkable now as it was then, an original, raw, and wild novel that has held its power and demands to be read.”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer
“A shimmering, ferocious, funny, campy, disturbing, violent, benevolent, dazzling beast of a tale. Dogeaters was a joy to read the first time, but rereading it today made me realize Jessica Hagedorn is the divine mother goddess of novelists.”
—Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street
“Dogeaters is a fine achievement on a very serious scale . . . This is the definitive novel of the encounter between the Philippines and America and their history of mutual illusion, antagonism, and ambiguous affection. It is a rich and satisfying work and certainly among the best novels I have read this year.”
—Robert Stone, author of Dog Soldiers
“I still vividly remember when Dogeaters came out—it was instantly and rightfully hailed a groundbreaking American classic. Jessica Hagedorn has shaped our ways of understanding modern America and reading American literature. Her Dogeaters is indelible, and indispensable in the American canon.”
—Gina Apostol, author of Insurrecto
“Mixing real-life ghouls with phantoms from the past . . . Hagedorn captured that mixture of love, laughter and sadness that stirs in every Filipino's heart. [Dogeaters] is a mournful, obsessive ballad about Filipino lives left in postcolonial disarray.”
—Randy Gener, The New York Times
“[Dogeaters] secur[ed] Hagedorn’s reputation as an important voice in Asian American letters. The narrative style impressed readers as well as critics: a multiple-character point of view that wove American pop icons into the Filipino cultural fabric, it illuminated the chaotic and wondrous post-colonial Manila of the 1950s.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“No nonfiction book is likely to capture the cultural psychosis of the Phillippines nearly as well as this exceptiona novel about growing up there.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Entertaining and compelling. . . . At the end, you emerge from its intense, dreamlike world feeling as if you’ve been to the Philippines.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Hagedorn transcends social strata, gender, culture, and politics in this exuberant, witty, and telling portrait of Philippine society.”
—The San Diego Union
“A tour-de-force debut . . . A kaleidoscopic view of Manila society—high and low—in which sad and sordid realities are tempered by humor and immense vitality . . . A spicy stew of a novel.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The book succeeds on the strength of its characterization . . . Hagedorn's unflinching view of Manila . . . is leavened by ironic, often humorous observations.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The quintessential Filipino American novel.”
—The Nation
“Hagedorn unwaveringly paints a menacing world, one that should sound an urgent alarm to us now—but the book is so beautiful! It’s painted in the shimmering, fierce, lush colors of memory and longing; it has the radiant evanescence of a dream—and it leaves behind the lingering authority of a dream’s veiled warning.”
—The New York Review of Books
“A surrealistically hip epic of Manila . . . Combines narrative drive with a lyric sensibility.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle
“As sharp and fast as a street boy’s razor . . . a rich small feast of a book.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Dogeaters erupts from its pages, 50 percent voluptuous fever dream, 50 percent heart-stopping nightmare, 100 percent reality. The hallucinatory vision of this colonial world—the crucible of the innocent, the rapacious, the collaborators, the oblivious, the martyred—feels flawless, irrefutable. Hagedorn writes with exhilarating stylistic dexterity, deep compassion, humor that ranges from gentle and affectionate to fire-breathing, and immense grace. The book is every bit as astonishing as it was when it first appeared thirty years ago, and unfortunately much more pertinent—a piercing warning signal, now that we have installed a deranged and brutal pseudo-populist dictator in our own country.”
—Deborah Eisenberg, author of Your Duck is My Duck
“Possibly the most brutally, hilariously accurate portrait of post-colonial Jamaica I’ve ever read. And it’s a novel about the Philippines.”
—Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf
“Unquestionably a classic, Dogeaters is a tour-de-force that remains as relevant and revelatory as it did when it first gut-punched the literary industry 30 years ago. Its restless prose, its collisions of peoples, cultures, and histories, and its resolute memory-keepers, such as Rio, have much left to say about our troubled times.”
—Rigoberto González, author of The Book of Ruin
“Jessica Hagedorn has been an inspiration to me for nearly thirty years, ever since I read Dogeaters. It is as remarkable now as it was then, an original, raw, and wild novel that has held its power and demands to be read.”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer
“A shimmering, ferocious, funny, campy, disturbing, violent, benevolent, dazzling beast of a tale. Dogeaters was a joy to read the first time, but rereading it today made me realize Jessica Hagedorn is the divine mother goddess of novelists.”
—Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street
“Dogeaters is a fine achievement on a very serious scale . . . This is the definitive novel of the encounter between the Philippines and America and their history of mutual illusion, antagonism, and ambiguous affection. It is a rich and satisfying work and certainly among the best novels I have read this year.”
—Robert Stone, author of Dog Soldiers
“I still vividly remember when Dogeaters came out—it was instantly and rightfully hailed a groundbreaking American classic. Jessica Hagedorn has shaped our ways of understanding modern America and reading American literature. Her Dogeaters is indelible, and indispensable in the American canon.”
—Gina Apostol, author of Insurrecto
“Mixing real-life ghouls with phantoms from the past . . . Hagedorn captured that mixture of love, laughter and sadness that stirs in every Filipino's heart. [Dogeaters] is a mournful, obsessive ballad about Filipino lives left in postcolonial disarray.”
—Randy Gener, The New York Times
“[Dogeaters] secur[ed] Hagedorn’s reputation as an important voice in Asian American letters. The narrative style impressed readers as well as critics: a multiple-character point of view that wove American pop icons into the Filipino cultural fabric, it illuminated the chaotic and wondrous post-colonial Manila of the 1950s.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“No nonfiction book is likely to capture the cultural psychosis of the Phillippines nearly as well as this exceptiona novel about growing up there.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Entertaining and compelling. . . . At the end, you emerge from its intense, dreamlike world feeling as if you’ve been to the Philippines.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Hagedorn transcends social strata, gender, culture, and politics in this exuberant, witty, and telling portrait of Philippine society.”
—The San Diego Union
“A tour-de-force debut . . . A kaleidoscopic view of Manila society—high and low—in which sad and sordid realities are tempered by humor and immense vitality . . . A spicy stew of a novel.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The book succeeds on the strength of its characterization . . . Hagedorn's unflinching view of Manila . . . is leavened by ironic, often humorous observations.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The quintessential Filipino American novel.”
—The Nation
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