Our best Filipino books of 2020

Here, we asked a few critics, writers, and publishers to give us some of their best or favorite reads of 2020. — Don Jaucian KRISTINE ONG MUSLIM, writer “Balada ng Bala at iba pang mga tula” is a 200-page volume of poems by Wiji Thukul, an Indonesian labor organizer and a desaparecido of the US-backed Suharto regime. The poems, edited and translated into Filipino by Mark Laurence D. Garcia and Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III, were written and published in the span of at least a decade. No greasy conceits of hagiography soiled the editors’ introduction. Expect a thoughtful contextualization that situates the recurring themes in Thukul’s body of work in the Philippines, where the Duterte regime — in the guise of an anti-insurgency, anti-terrorism campaign — is arresting or killing dissenters. Expect a compelling dissection that shows how Thukul’s political struggles had shaped his art — and not the other way around.