11/2024: Thank you for visiting. This page is under construction.
From the author of
The Umbrella Country and
The Gods We Worship Live Next Door
and soon . . .
Bataan New Jersey, a historical novel
#TheRebelSonnets, a poetry collection, and
Kiko Rosas' The F.L.I.P Show, a short story collection
It’s 2025. I have three new manuscripts to publish. One, BATAAN NEW JERSEY, put me in a direct confrontation with my family’s legacy of war and survival. I knew that time would come when I would have to take on BATAAN. I am a son of a Death March survivor, and our Filipino voice in the published stories of war is rare. As I update this website, I will explore what new meanings War and History have for me. War, because it's my family's dark shadow. History, because it's my light, my obsession since I was a child in Manila. Both so relevant in the Present.
I was never told that blood warms at the emergence of new tellings.
- The Warming (#TheRebelSonnets)
"What tied is tied."
Soon, it's 2025
My first novel came out in 1999. My first poetry collection in 2006. While keeping a scheduled life that has kept me in line with the universe -- a FT management job in the field of education. With no pressure to publish, I have focused mostly on the Art of writing in the past 15 years. My sacred space. What brought me joy gave me three completed manuscripts. I worked, traveled the world with my husband, and published in literary journals such as The Georgia Review, The Harvard Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, etc. Now time is shifting. I need to go out there again. The winds of publishing are calling. What I disliked most, I have to face. But this time, I'm wiser, more mature, more experience in the reality of management, and not as self-absorbed.
Old Works
On this website, I am dividing my works into two parts: "old" and "new," between published books and manuscripts, between the past and the future. When I published my first novel in NYC, I was very naive. Naive, even for the co-founder of the seminal organization, The Asian American Writers Workshop. I sold my first novel before I turned 30. Hanya Yanagihara apparently talked me up at Random House that a senior editor started looking for me. It was 1997. Marie Myung Ok Lee would refer me to an agent at Harold Ober so I could start the publishing conversation. I finally met the Random House editor who acquired my book as part of a new imprint at Random House. Then, Bertelsmann took over the press. A whirlwind. The Umbrella Country did eventually come out in 1999, a different press at RH, a different plan. One goal: plant the roots so deep the novel would survive for the next twenty or so years.
& New Works
As soon as I finished #TheRebelSonnets, I went back to reading and writing fiction. Pandemic era. After I read Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, I started wondering the similarity between Japan's relationship with Korea and what Japan did to the Philippines during the war. Obsessed with Korea-drama narrative structures and now fresh out of Pachinko's 600 pages, I set out to write a historical novel about the Philippines, with its heart in Bataan. What I had avoided for so long became a commitment to surface my father's Bataan legacy.
All works of nature evolve
from one moment of coincidence. An absence,
a rebellion, the fifteenth line of a sonnet.
- Euler's Equation (#TheRebelSonnets)
CONTACT: Email Binoliterary@gmail.com
Bataan New Jersey Pitch:
A son of a Bataan Death March survivor, poet Bino A. Realuyo pens BATAAN NEW JERSEY, an epic novel spanning 100 hundred years from 1921 to 2021, reminiscent of “Covenant of Water” and “Pachinko” with a contemporary twist—four Queer generations of a Filipino family impacted by wars inflicted by Spain, the U.S., and Japan on Philippine soil, converging in the biggest military surrender in American history, World War II’s Fall of Bataan.
Excerpt from the first chapter:
Engelbert Humperdinck’s rendition of the world’s greatest love songs ended. She had no desire to play it back. But tempted for a minute to pick up a book from the pile of poetry books next to her that Irma brought the last time she visited, but her mind was floundering under the spell of the dim light, a shadow of relief cast over her pensive lips. She thought about longing and belonging, how much these two words sounded the same. What is longing but Mother Time’s inability to listen to herself? What is belonging but her ability to listen to others?
- Bataan New Jersey