“The rude comedown from having lived so much inside a story it felt real.” “I never could get used to the ‘withdrawal,’” the character admits. This is a book in which characters are addicted to dreaming, embellishing, or outright lying, and in one story a young woman even goes so far as to become that most heinous of fraudsters: a fiction writer. Many of the stories in the book deal with literal border-crossings, but what binds the collection together more broadly is a sense of creative displacement. As a writer, she has the ability to capture that peculiar blend of excitement and pain that comes with uprooting oneself from a specific place or idea. This week marks the release of In The Country, Mia Alvar’s debut book, a rich and varied collection of short stories about the lives of men and women within the Philippine diaspora.Īlvar was born in the Philippines and lived there until she was six, after which her family moved to Bahrain and eventually to New York.
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