Krip Yuson’s
LUSH LIFE: Essays 2001-2010, a collection of 75 essays representing the Palanca Hall of Fame awardee’s writings for the past decade, was launched last October 20, 2011 at the Champagne Room of The Manila Hotel.
Published by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House,
Lush Life is a personal anthology of one of the country’s most distinguished fictionists and poets. The essays in the collection comprise what Yuson himself describes as “the full range of my sybaritic interests—communal wassailing, varieties of spirits and spiritual experience, friendship, poetry, literature in general, demure dalliances, transgender and trans-generational camaraderie, the departure of loved ones, the country I love.”
Says Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, director of the UST Publishing House, in an advance review of Yuson’s
Lush Life: “This collection of 75 essays is proof, were further proof needed, that he has few equals in the field of nonfiction. It also demonstrates how a life fully lived—its dizzying heights scaled, its dark depths plumbed—combined with a large soul, an ironic vision, an unfailingly playful sense of humor, and the gift of bending the language to his every whim, are what lead to great writing.”
Krip Yuson is the pen name of Alfred A. Yuson, whose prodigious literary output includes no less than 20 books, including novels, poetry collections, short fiction, essays, and children’s stories, apart from having edited several books by various authors. He was conferred the S.E.A. Write Award in 1992 for lifetime achievement, and has been elevated to the Hall of Fame of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.
Lush Life is Yuson’s second collection of personal essays. The first,
The Word on Paradise: Essays 1991-2000—On Writers and Writing (2001, Anvil Publishing), is a collection of essays—also totaling 75—written by Yuson in the 1990s.