Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 53

Train to Busan is the movie for these bizarre times

It turns out zombies really can’t be killed. The Walking Dead has been on forever, and it seems like a new zombie apocalypse movie/tv series premieres every month. Please, there are zombie romcoms. The Korean blockbuster Train to Busan by Yeon Sang-Ho takes all the tropes of zombie movies and throws them onto a speeding […]

“To read a Saki story is to hire an assassin.”

To read a Saki story is to hire an assassin. There have been many attempts in the last hundred years to re-create that specific Saki feeling; the pleasures of laying waste to convention combined with the quickening promise of something wilder in its stead. Nobody has yet managed it entirely, but in the pursuit of […]

In search of the most spectacular high tea in Singapore

Clifford Pier My one concession to touristiness was high tea. “Would you prefer fabulous food, or a spectacular view?” Noel asked. As I’ve said before, I have the palate of a stevedore so I chose ambience. High tea at Clifford Pier in the Fullerton Bay Hotel defeated me completely. The setting, a repurposed historical landmark, […]

Science tells us how to hold a coffee mug so you don’t spill coffee on yourself

Like this. Presumably after spilling his own coffee one too many times, physicist Jiwon Han decided to see if there was a better way to drink his java. Han took it upon himself to test new methods to find a more efficient and stable way to hold a coffee mug, Nick Rose writes for Munchies. […]

City of Cats

Cat in Holland Village Noel wanted to go someplace fabulous and bleeding with local color, but I really am the most boring guest. I wanted to go to temple immediately, i.e. Kinokuniya. To my credit, I was in and out in just over an hour. I found: – Sweet Caress, which is not a romance […]

A change of scenery

I’d never spent more than three days in Singapore, and only for work, never by choice. Then one of my closest friends, Noel, moved to Singapore and rented a three-room flat so he could have visitors, and I needed a quiet place to finish my second drafts. I write in restaurants and at home, where […]

The Philippine Readers and Writers Festival presents Pulitzer winner Adam Johnson

Where am I going?

Not a rhetorical question.

Tales of Mt Cloud: The Bookshop Ghost and the Crying Floor

It took me an hour and a half to get to the bus station in Cubao from Makati (It wasn’t raining), and four hours to get to Baguio on the 10:15 express bus (no stops, snacks, washroom on board). As soon as we left Metro Manila I could feel an invisible iron band loosening around […]

If you’re in Baguio, come to my reading at Mt Cloud

I’m reading from my new novel.