Monstress - (Art of the Story) by Lysley Tenorio (Paperback)

About the Book

A collection of stories set amongst the Filipino communities of California and the Philippines.

Book Synopsis

A luminous collection of heartbreaking, startling, and gloriously unique
stories set amongst the Filipino communities of California and the Philippines--now
with a new preface by the author

Monstress stands as a landmark of American multicultural
short fiction. Lysley Tenorio's tales are framed by tense, fascinating
dichotomies: tenderness and power, the fantastical and the realistic, pop
culture and high culture, the American and the Filipino. Tenorio balances these
opposites with rare skill, humor, and deep understanding, exploring universal
themes--the sometimes-suffocating ties of family, the melancholy of isolation,
the need to find connections--with uncommon empathy and breathtaking
originality.

Review Quotes

"With Monstress, Lysley Tenorio gives us a wonderful story collection that's as wide and rich and complex as the geography it spans. Hard enough to make sense of life when you're rooted to one place, one culture; how much more impossible it must be for those many in our midst who straddle one place and another. Yet Tenorio is that rare breed of writer who mines gold from the impossible. He sees everything--the absurd and the tragic, the funny and profound--and delivers stories that are as true to life as any you will ever read." - Ben Fountain, PEN/Hemingway award-winning author of BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH CHE GUEVARA
"Tenorio is that rare breed of writer who mines gold from the impossible. He sees everything--the absurd and the tragic, the funny and profound--and delivers stories that are as true to life as any you will ever read." - Ben Fountain, PEN/Hemingway award-winning author of BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH CHE GUEVARA
"Lysley Tenorio is a writer of sly wit and lively invention--these are stories bursting with wonders (from monster movies and leper colonies, to faith-healers and superheroes)--but most wondrous of all is his intimate sense of character. Each story is a confession of love betrayed, told with a mournful, austere tenderness as heartbreaking as it is breathtaking." - Peter Ho Davies, author of THE WELSH GIRL Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl
"The stories in Monstress announce the debut of an electric literary talent. Brilliantly quirky, often moving, always gorgeously told, these are tales of big-hearted misfits who yearn for their authentic selves with extraordinary passion and grace. Bravo for this fabulous American fiction!" - Chang-Rae Lee, NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author of NATIVE SPEAKER and THE SURRENDER
"I've been waiting for Lysley Tenorio's first book ever since I read "Superassassin" years ago. And now that debut collection is here, and it's better than I hoped: poignant, imaginative, somehow sad and funny all at once. Tenorio's characters walk tightropes strung between the Philippines and America, between illusions and reality, between family ties and the need to strike out alone. MONSTRESS is a wonderful read. " - Anthony Doerr, author of MEMORY WALL
"Lysley Tenorio's first book [is] better than I hoped: poignant, imaginative, somehow sad and funny all at once. Tenorio's characters walk tightropes strung between the Philippines and America, between illusions and reality, between family ties and the need to strike out alone. Monstress is a wonderful read. " - Anthony Doerr, author of MEMORY WALL
"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
“Tenorio's stories, set amid mingling nationalities and generations, prompt comparisons to the works of Junot Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri... But the refreshingly wry stories in Monstress are rangier and less concerned with documenting the specific experience of emigrating. Instead they're focused on uncanny moments when a character realizes that something essential to his or her life might be as false and frightening as that bucket of blood... In voicing the idiosyncratic particulars of Filipino Americana, Monstress succeeds and makes its dark fringes of modernity feel as known as a childhood home. But its goals are wider and more slippery than mere documentation. All his characters are in the process of becoming, and that leads to some unanswerable questions about who they are. That's the intersection where Monstress works best.” - Los Angeles Times
"Tenorio's stories, set amid mingling nationalities and generations, prompt comparisons to the works of Junot Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri... But the refreshingly wry stories...are rangier and...focused on uncanny moments when a character realizes that something essential to his or her life might be...false and frightening." - Los Angeles Times
"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)
"[Monstress] introduces a unique voice from an underrepresented slice of the American experience." - The Onion A.V. Club
“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
“[W]insome...illuminating...Tenorio's stories are built on unique - even outrageous - premises. Yet he manages to make fabulous setups plausible through his meticulous crafting, deeply imagining the lives of a memorable cast of eccentrics...Lots of fiction is darkly comic, but Tenorio manages also to be silly and profound, a rare pairing...For readers who shy away from short stories on the grounds that they're often quiet or uneventful, lacking the depth of character or range of tone of novels, Tenorio might make a convert of you.” - San Francisco Chronicle
"[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
"[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
"[A]n impressive debut... Although the situations are sometimes bleak, the stories benefit from Tenorio's wry sense of humor." - San Jose Mercury News
"[A] jittery, caffeinated, dazzling collection with a poignant center. The characters, straddling Filipino and American traditions, will charm you with their wit and devastate you with their loneliness. And in addition to being quirky and moving, the eight stories unfold beautifully in language that evokes...Junot Diaz." - Slate
"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
"MONSTRESS, a debut collection of short stories by Lysley Tenorio, is a gift: a chance to understand what those Filipino émigrés might have been saying about their lives, loves, disappointments and sense of being the other...Don't expect happy endings, but do expect to be moved, dazzled and surprised." - Washington Independent Review of Books
Lysley Tenorio's darkly funny stories capture the contradictions and complexities of being both Filipino and a citizen of the world. Tenorio is a deep and original writer, and Monstress is simply a beautiful book. - Jessica Hagedorn, author of DOGEATERS
"[An] intimate and admirably controlled debut story collection... [Monstress is] an introduction to a promising writer who knows how to get a reader's attention....Tenorio has a great knack for striking story premises... [and] cultivates a plainspoken (but not blunt) style that recalls Tobias Wolff." - Kirkus Reviews
"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
"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
"Spanning several decades and diverse settings, Tenorio's debut story collection is a vibrant survey of Filipino-American immigrant history. The tales are tragic, but Tenorio makes the most of his gift for black humor." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Lysley Tenorio is a writer of sly wit and lively invention--these are stories bursting with wonders...but most wondrous of all is his intimate sense of character. Each story is a confession of love betrayed, told with a mournful, austere tenderness as heartbreaking as it is breathtaking." - Peter Ho Davies, author of THE WELSH GIRL
"Tenorio's wit is understated; his writing is deft and self-assured; his dramas don't shout, but whisper, seductive and heartfelt. Monstress is one of the wisest and heartfelt collections I've read. I've waited a long time for this book." - Daniel Orozco, author of ORIENTATION AND OTHER STORIES
"Monstress is an exhilarating rollercoaster of a book. Deeply funny, heartbreaking, hopeful, philosophical, bawdy, and wise, Tenorio's stories, written from the underbelly of the American Dream, present one brilliant portrait after another." - Sabina Murray, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of THE CAPRICES and TALES OF THE NEW WORLD
"In these fantastic stories, Tenorio skillfully blends the unlikely and the emotional, the bizarre and the humane. His writing portrays the universal human condition through unique specificity, and is very deserving of attention." - Rishi Reddi, author of KARMA AND OTHER STORIES