Percival Stuffington, nicknamed ?Stuffie?, is a good-for-nothing, a womanizer and a crook. He belongs to the theatre of the grotesque. His ignorance and dishonesty is exposed when he poses as a teacher of English to foreign students in a London private school. He flies to California, where he tries to pass as a golf instructor. Finally he plans to extort money from a former fellow student by poisoning him, and promising the quick delivery of the antidote against a staggering sum.

“Absurdistan is not just a hilarious novel, but a record of a particular peak in the history of human folly. No one is more capable of dealing with the transition from the hell of socialism to the hell of capitalism in Eastern Europe than Shteyngart, the great-great grandson of one Nikolai Gogol and the funniest foreigner alive.” –Aleksandar Hemon From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook comes the uproarious and poignant story of one very fat man and one very small country Meet Misha Vainberg, aka Snack Daddy, a 325-pound disaster of a human being, son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia, proud holder of a degree in multicultural studies from Accidental College, USA (don’t even ask), and patriot of no country save the great City of New York. Poor Misha just wants to live in the South Bronx with his hot Latina girlfriend, but after his gangster father murders an Oklahoma businessman in Russia, all hopes of a U.S. visa are lost. Salvation lies in the tiny, oil-rich nation of Absurdistan, where a crooked consular officer will sell Misha a Belgian passport. But after a civil war breaks out between two competing ethnic groups and a local warlord installs hapless Misha as minister of multicultural affairs, our hero soon finds himself covered in oil, fighting for his life, falling in love, and trying to figure out if a normal life is still possible in the twenty-first century. With the enormous success of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Gary Shteyngart established himself as a central figure in today’s literary world—“one of the most talented and entertaining writers of his generation,” according to The New York Observer. In Absurdistan, he delivers an even funnier and wiser literary performance. Misha Vainberg is a hero for the new century, a glimmer of humanity in a world of dashed hopes.

When the Spaniards conquered the Philippines (Cebu 1565, Manila 1571), they noticed several of its nations had a writing system of their own, called Baybáyin in Tagalog. It was a king of short-hand that did not make it possible to record closing consonants; thus i-lu in Baybáyin could represent í-log "river", i-lóng "nose" or it-lóg "egg", so much so that, while easy to write, it was difficult to read. Because of this shortcoming, it gave way to the Latin alphabet in the course of the 17th century. Nowadays Filipino graphic artists are reviving Baybáyin to express their philippineness.

Briefly describes the human history and culture of the Philippines, focusing on three Filipino cultural communities--the Moros, the Indios, and the Infieles--and examining how these groups reflect the country's history and development.

Tagalog, spoken in Manila and the surrounding provinces, Luzon, Philippines, is a major language of the western branch of the Austronesian family. The bulk of this book is devoted to parallel words also found in Malay, a member of the same branch. These words are either cognates descending from Proto-Austronesian or borrowings from the same foreign languages. Other cognates were found in Javanese, Malagasy, Tahitian and even Siamese. The last third of the book deals with Sanskrit, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and English loanwords.

This book is the list of printed documents I have collected about the Philippines in general and the Tagalog language in particular. The entries are followed by an index of the themes involved.

This book is a provisional essay, followed by a vocabulary and an index, on the Tagalogs' world view in the Sixteenth Century. It is mainly based on the entries of the earliest dictionaries of the Tagalog language. These were written by Spanish lexicographers about half-a-century after the conquest of the Philippines (Cebu 1565, Manila 1571). Additional data are drawn from Spanish chronicles. Many of the recorded beliefs and customs were already obsolete at the turn of the Seventeenth Century. Some are extremely surprising, starting from the primeval myth according to which the world had no solid land at its beginning, but only two fluids, water and air.