Monstress - Tapa blanda

"[W]insome...illuminating...[Tenorio] manages to make fabulous setups plausible through his meticulous crafting, deeply imagining the lives of a memorable cast of eccentrics.... For readers who shy away from short stories on the grounds that they're often quiet or uneventful...Tenorio might make a convert of you."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Tenorio, born in the Philippines and raised in California, has taken a uniquely Filipino-American perspective, polyglot and glittering with cinema dreams, and used it to make a bold collection of stories of the rejected, the helpless and the lost. Monstress is the debut of a singular talent."--NPR.org

"A wondrous clutch of stories that pits the customs and superstitions of his Philippines homeland against the fads and fetishes of his adopted America. Set in Manila, Hollywood, and San Francisco, these yarns feature... memorably endearing eccentrics."--Elle

"Tenorio writes persuasively about otherness and connection... [his] characters are zany, witty, and beautifully drawn... Ultimately, though, it is the unassuming pitch of these stories that makes them so exquisitely deadly."--Slate, The XX Factor

"[Monstress] introduces a unique voice from an underrepresented slice of the American experience."--The Onion A.V. Club

"[A] compassionate and entertaining new collection...The book's most poignant tale is Save the I-Hotel, a chiaroscuro of loneliness that's also a quiet portrait of abiding friendship and life-changing betrayal."--Boston Globe

"Tenorio skillfully balances the beautiful and grotesque, the fantastical and commonplace to arrive at his particularly insightful renderings of the human condition.... [The] reader feels an immediate sense of intimacy with the most unlikely of protagonists."--The Oregonian (Portland)

"Tenorio lays bare hearts that dare to hope but wind up disappointed, always with the wit and power of a born storyteller."--San Francisco Weekly

"[A]n impressive debut... Although the situations are sometimes bleak, the stories benefit from Tenorio's wry sense of humor."--San Jose Mercury News

"Complex, and powerful....This first collection introduces a writer of great promise, whose stories can illustrate tenderness at one minute and human cruelty not much later. Tenorio's writing is immediate, visceral even....[A] vital addition for short-fiction collections [and] readers of Junot Diaz, Chang-Rae Lee, and Jessica Hagedorn."--Booklist

This heartrending, funny and utterly original collection of stories, exploring the clash and meld of American and Filipino culture, centers around the sometimes suffocating ties of family, the melancholy of isolation and the need to find connections. Original. 20,000 first printing.