Penguin Classics, an imprint that focuses on important literary canon, will be adding its fifth Filipino text this year: Filipino-American Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, a semi-autobiographical tale published in 1946.
Bulosan’s work will follow National Hero Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, poet Jose Garcia Villa‘s Doveglion, and Nick Joaquin‘s The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic.
According to Penguin, America Is in the Heart is a “social classic about the United States in the 1930s from the perspective of a Filipino migrant laborer who endures racial violence and struggles with the paradox of the American dream.”
The edition will come with a foreword by novelist Elaine Castillo, who published the novel America Is Not the Heart just last year. The novel continues Bulosan’s examination of the American dream. The reprint will also come with an introduction by Bulosan scholar E. San Juan, and a collection of letters selected by Bulosan expert Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao.
Penguin Classics is under the Penguin Group, one of the leading publishers in the world. Joaquin will join novelists like Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka, and many more.
The Penguin Classics edition will be released on May 21, 2019, with preorders available on the Penguin website. The book will be sold for $18 (roughly P944.76).
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