SOURCE: Hussein, Aamer. Review of Dogeaters, by Jessica Hagedorn. Times Literary Supplement, no. 4617 (27 September 1991): 26.

In the following review, Hussein examines the themes of fantasy, food, and popular culture in Dogeaters, calling the novel “an echo of an epic ballad of resistance.”

At the entrance of the Manila Intercontinental Hotel, a radical senator is shot down. Two bystanders, one a waiter with dreams of show business success, the other a male prostitute and petty criminal, are caught up in a chain of events that will lead to the imprisonment of one and the other's flight to a guerrilla hideout in the mountains. Meanwhile, on the borders of this narrative, the story of Daisy, the senator's daughter, arrested for her seditious activities, interrogated and brutalized, unfolds.

Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters is a song of her native Manila, a walk on its wild side where, in the city's pits of deprivation, the...