Nick Joaquin breaks into BBC’s April reading list, gets praised by NPR

Ahead of the centennial anniversary of his birth, Nick Joaquin is enjoying a renaissance as his seminal short story collection "The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic" finds a new audience in the west.

READ: Nick Joaquin and Filipino writers as enchanting reads, not tedious textbooks

Joaquin in April officially joined Jose Rizal and Jose Garcia Villa as only the third Filipino writer to be published by Penguin Classics.

The book was welcomed positively by US public radio network NPR, reviewed by "Persona" series writer Genevieve Valentine. She praises Joaquin as a "ruthless observer of human frailty" whose writing is "beautifully dense."

She further wrote, "That sense of abandonment — of constantly approaching a ruin — is everywhere in Joaquin's work; the political and cultural history of the Philippines makes such things hard to avoid. Each generation blames and idolizes its forebears by turns, tries to carve out its own identity amid the Spanish church or American soldiers, or tries to build nostalgia amid doomed recollections or looming futures ... 'The Woman Who Had Two Navels' is a transporting read, and a fierce elegy for a past that never was."

"The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic" was also met warmly by BBC, with writer Jane Ciabattari including it in its list of "Ten Books to Read in April."

The Penguin Classics edition of "The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic" is exclusively available in National Book Store. —NB, GMA News