A group of six Filipino former activists confront the public and themselves following a high-profile murder in this spectacularly satirical new novel from the one and only Gina Apostol
In the aftermath of Trump’s second election, six Filipino former activists from the Marcos–era resistance gather in New York to eat, bicker, sing songs of schadenfreude, and quote Gramsci. Calling themselves the Justice League of People-of-Color Schadenfreude, they’ve survived fascism once—and their hard-won understanding of the American moment leaves them clear eyed and mordantly funny. When a member of their circle becomes an accidental witness to a high-profile murder, the group is jolted into new political peril and unexpected forms of solidarity.
With her wild sense of play and razor-sharp satire, Gina Apostol delivers a novel unlike any she’s written before, even as it extends her central preoccupations: the entanglements of the U.S. and the Philippines, empire and authoritarianism, the erasures of history and its stubborn return. Schadenfreude is fun and frustrating, passionate and distressing, terrifically funny and deeply serious—a comic fable for our stupid, evil times, told with insights only Apostol could conjure and with a cast impossible not to adore (or fear).
Genre: General Fiction
In the aftermath of Trump’s second election, six Filipino former activists from the Marcos–era resistance gather in New York to eat, bicker, sing songs of schadenfreude, and quote Gramsci. Calling themselves the Justice League of People-of-Color Schadenfreude, they’ve survived fascism once—and their hard-won understanding of the American moment leaves them clear eyed and mordantly funny. When a member of their circle becomes an accidental witness to a high-profile murder, the group is jolted into new political peril and unexpected forms of solidarity.
With her wild sense of play and razor-sharp satire, Gina Apostol delivers a novel unlike any she’s written before, even as it extends her central preoccupations: the entanglements of the U.S. and the Philippines, empire and authoritarianism, the erasures of history and its stubborn return. Schadenfreude is fun and frustrating, passionate and distressing, terrifically funny and deeply serious—a comic fable for our stupid, evil times, told with insights only Apostol could conjure and with a cast impossible not to adore (or fear).
Genre: General Fiction