Sabina Murray - Slow Burn

Selected Links

The Rumpus

I talk to Margaret Lee about the joys of editing

HUFFPOST, After Sebald

Lithub

Sabina in conversation with Jane Ciabattari about The Human Zoo

New York Times Magazine

Letters of Recommendation: Spam, because I actually do eat Spam

LitHub

Gina Apostol discusses her provocative novel The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata

Cosmonauts Avenue

Philosophy, a personal essay about my mother

VICE

Man of the People, How could Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, despite his policy of murder, be so popular?

World Literature Today

My Mother, Migration, and Me, a meditation on my mother's immigrant status

LitHub

How Can We Make the MFA Workshop More Hospitable to Writers of Color, Ocean Vuong and I talk about silencing, compassion, and pedagogy

The Rumpus

Every Woman Is A Nation Unto Herself: A Conversation with Sabina Murray, I chat with Edie Meidav about the influences on Valiant Gentlemen

LitHub

What Can Historical Fiction Accomplish That History Does Not, Time theory and a prickly encounter with a "famous American writer."

Huffington Post

After Sebald, an essay that looks at Sebald's influence on contemporary writers

Paris Review

Wordsworth's she dwelt among the untrodden ways, essay about my grandfather's relationship with a poem

From "Slow Burn"

I've heard them talk about mountain climbing. It was popular about ten years ago. There were mountain-climbing weekends when people kept cabins in Ilocos Norte and Benguet and invited friends and relatives to join them. Dressed in hiking outfits, the climbers made their way to the summit, or as far as could be walked without much effort. They broke for lunch around noon. Servants who had carried the baskets of cured meat and fruit up the mountainside set out the food and plates and silverware on large checkered blankets, and everyone sat down and ate. For most, the hiking endeavor ended here. Drinking and eating in the clean mount air was far more pleasant than dragging oneself, puffing and probably drenched with perspiration, to the top of a mountain. The younger and stronger men and women persevered,and often made it to the top. The popularity of mountain climbing has since declined. Now people prefer to haunt the nightclubs of Makati Avenue and Manila, and one a more civilized note, the ballet and opera. It seems more worthwhile, because, from the top of a mountain, one can see everything, but is seen by no one. I often wonder what it would have been like to be with the mountain climbers. I go to nightclubs.

Slow Burn

Slow Burn follows the story of Isobel della Fortuna, party regular, society member, illegitimate daughter of a powerful man. As Isobel struggles to find security and belonging in the Manila scene of the Marcos-era mid-eighties, we glimpse a culture that is brilliant in its horrific glory, although at the brink of extinction.

"Murray's tightly wound, efficient, pungent prose and milieu of tragic decadence is reminiscent of Hemingway, but with a feminine spin."—Booklist

"This is a despairing but oddly companionable book that could have been written by Jean Rhys is she'd been a member of the Imelda Marcos Crowd. Bratty, decadent, maddening, yes, but also compulsively readable, impeccably written and convincing. Sabina Murray has revealed to me a world that I hadn't even suspected might exist."—Edmund White

"Isobel della Fortuna's journey into darkness unfolds with a steady lucidity of focus many a mature novelist will envy. Sabina Murray is a gifted writer, a true natural, one who would tell a good story if she had always lived in a box. Fortunately for us, she grew up in Manila, an exotic, troubled city Murray has the depth of perception to love and hate in equal parts. Slow Burn is grounded in a world of contrasts only an insider could know, not just wealth and poverty, corruption and squalor (though Murray has always an eye on these), but beauty and pathos as well."—Valerie Martin