The Justice League of People of Color Schadenfreude by Gina Apostol (Hardcover) (PREORDER)

Fiction - Literary - Satire - Political - Humor - Dark Humor

RELEASE DATE: 3/16/2027 (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER'S WAREHOUSE)

A group of six Filipina New Yorkers—self-described “Third World witches” who grew up with fascists, goons, and torture apologists—find themselves entangled in a high-profile murder investigation.

At a West Village restaurant after Trump’s first election, six friends gather to eat, bicker, sing songs of schadenfreude, and quote Gramsci. They name themselves the Justice League of People of Color Schadenfreude: they’ve survived fascism once, in the Philippines, and what’s happening in America feels awfully familiar. Eight years later, in the wake of Trump’s reelection, a member of their circle becomes an accidental witness to the killing of a CEO, and the group is thrust into new political dangers. As Trump unleashes wave after wave of authoritarian violence, years of gallows humor give way to action, and a plan begins to form, a plot to transform Filipino workers laboring invisibly in the US into shadow revolutionaries.

With her wild sense of play, razor-sharp satire, and brilliant cast of characters, Gina Apostol delivers a novel unlike any she has written before, even as it deepens her signature concerns: the entanglements of the United States and the Philippines, empire and authoritarianism, the erasures of history and its stubborn return. Schadenfreude is hilarious and exasperating, passionate and unsettling—a comic fable for our stupid, evil times, animated by insights only Apostol could conjure.

AUTHOR BIO: 

Gina Apostol is the author of the novels La Tercera, Bibliolepsy, Insurrecto, Gun Dealers' Daughter, and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. She is the recipient of a PEN/Open Book Award and two Philippine National Book Awards. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, and Massachusetts Review. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, in the Philippines.

Praise for Gina Apostol

"Apostol is a magician with language (think Borges, think Nabokov) who can swing from slang and mockery to the stodgy argot of critical theory. She puns with gusto, potently and unabashedly, until one begins reading double meanings, allusions and ulterior motives into everything."
--The New York Times

"Gina Apostol uses an array of literary and cinematic techniques: memoirs, jump cuts, close-ups, and reveries to set a story in Duterte's Philippines that shows us that though victors often write histories, survivors and artists can revise them."
--NPR's Weekend Edition

"Wickedly funny . . . Ferocious in its political indignation . . . Pick one of the many figures offered by the novel itself: a palimpsest, a translation, a stereoscope, an abaca weave. Insurrecto is all of these things--a polyphonic work that challenges the reader to keep up with its plotting and to think with or against or through its complex moral reckonings."
--The Boston Globe