welcome to my homepage!

This is my literature review and sharing site! I'll be updating it as I go, and I'm pretty new to website coding (this site was created mid-2026), but I'm eager to learn.

Thanks for taking the time to visit my site! I'm still getting a handle on how I'd like to present my work and style here, so don't be surprised if this site goes down every now and then.

・.・✫ Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, **Second Edition, MICHAEL R. KATZ translation** . If I could sell my soul to the beings behind Norton Critical Editions, I would. This translation (and several others) from this series have greatly aided me in not only my academic work, but within my personal life and personal philosophies. Translations are fundamentally never going to be able to completely and faithfully convey everything intentioned from an original work, but this one is certainly a beautiful attempt to do so.

・.✫ On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. It's a beautiful and poetic epistolary novel appealing to me specifically through its brutal questioning and exploration of identity across citizenship, sexuality, and family. If you're into literary fiction, you're probably aware of 'pretentious' being a common insult found in reviews of such fiction. If you're not just into literary fiction, but are a lover of it, you're already aware that pointed fingers of "pretentiousness' are often at the end of arms from people who can not find worth in stories that beg them to linger in devastation and rebuilding. I have felt insane reading goodreads reviews from readers centering their own wants in direct opposition to the craft choices and focuses within the novel. Genuinely. If you "want" something "less abstract", then don't read abstract fiction. In the case of this novel, it's bad reviews are proof that this novel succeeded in its own wishes. If you're getting into epistolary novels and don't know what to read outside of Frankenstein and So Long a Letter, you must read this one next.

・.・✫ And Then? And Then? What Else? by Daniel Handler aka Lemony Snicket, a Memoir from a severely unique writer. Handler, or Snicket, is a children's book author that I've always seen as an absurdist, and yet it's interesting to see how he approaches life with secular humanism within this memoir. At times eyerolling-ly self-proclaimed quirky, this memoir is a fun casual read for inspiring oneself to Do Things.

・.✫ Dear America, Notes of an Undocumented Citizen by Jose Antonio Vargas, a Filipino US-Immigrant memoir that changed my life. I received a copy of this memoir from a professor at the end of a challenging semester with a frankly Too White workshop group. As literally the only asians within that classroom, I formed a close academic relationship with my professor over the cultural themes I had been approaching in my workshop drafts. This memoir explained frustrations I've had my whole life, and explained them without reading as a bullet point lecture simply promoting 'hard work above all else!!' as a solution that so much of Filipino literature ends up being bogged down by.

・.・✫ Dough by Elle Richardson, A short fiction piece found in New Ohio Review's Issue 37 that made me want to rip out its pages to put on my wall. I remember reading it during my lunch, and I remember not finishing my lunch. A wonderful recent piece, and one that made me grateful once again for my new goal of reading from three random literary magazines a month.

The Wrong Girls, a 2026 dark comedy film exploring intersectionality between womanhood, poverty, and drug abuse. I really enjoyed seeing this film and just walked out feeling almost as though I've been reinvigorated with defiance to rational egoism. ✫✫✫✫✫

EMPTY FOR NOW

EMPTY FOR NOW