PEOPLE ARE STRANGE

An unforgettable panorama of surreal weirdness, like Twilight Zone with an Asian, magic realist twist.

Misfits and outcasts populate these stories by one of the Philippines’ most enigmatic writers: a telekinetic savant wants to shake off his relationship with the Marcoses, a woman keeps receiving emails from her dead husband, a man discovers he can change his skin color at will—and becomes the object of an international manhunt. In these eight stories, Gamalinda creates a stranger-than-fiction world “where normal doesn’t exist.” 

In a lonely world, where everybody is looking for integration, where nobody wants to be different, we find our bond with humanity because everyone is strange. This is the fantastic idea of Eric Gamalinda and we congratulate him. – Yareah Magazine

Not only are the tales of People Are Strange remarkable and surprising, Gamalinda’s prose breaks the heart in unexpected places. Honest, lovely, real, this book is a must, with its awe-inspiring twists. – Kim Chinquee

“I have been able to speak to the Dalai Lama, attended a couple of meetings of the Ku Klux Klan, was singled out in a case of racial profiling in Trenton, New Jersey, and hung out with Mexican day laborers in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, where I learned how to laminate a bogus green card,” writes the fictional Eric Gamalinda, and I promise you will believe it of the real Eric Gamalinda who earned the right to title his book People Are Strange because it takes one to know one and he knows them all. Like Walt Whitman, he contains multitudes—but with a better sense of humor. – Barry Schwabsky, poet and art critic, The Nation

In People Are Strange, Eric Gamalinda masterfully crafts stories of everyday absurdity which bring us inside the untold lives of Filipino immigrants and the strange grip of nostalgia—a concert of narrations that pair identity, loss, and solitude with humor, forgiveness, love and reverence. – Susie Ibarra, Composer/Percussionist.

Cover art: Spa, by Umberto Grati.



Read excerpts from People Are Strange here and here and here.

To order People Are Strange, click here. 

Or buy the e-book here.