Nagueños / Carlos Ojeda Aureus.

Magnificent...a tour de force...(Aureus' fiction) would convince us, with its physics and metaphysics, its wit, passion and nostalgia for the baroque, pre-concilliar Church, that life, resurrection, not death, is the last word. -Gregorio C. Brillantes. Aureus strikes me as the most skillful and perceptive writer to appear on the literary scene since Wilfrido Nolledo and Renato Madrid (aka Fr. Rodolfo Villanueva) blazed new fiction trails in the 1960s. His Naga promises to ba as well-charted and immortalized as Joyce's Dublin of Joaquin's old Manila. -Benjamin S. Bautista. One of the finest actionists in our generation. _Domingo G. Landicho. Reading Aureus is like entering a baroque Cathedral. Religious devotion is not calm but raging. His characters are complex and varied as stained glass. Cabaret dancers, agnostics, Jesults, Insomniacs, CWL matrons, battered wives, gays, colegialas, mahjonggeras, beatas. Chismosas, hip-hops, saints, sinners-characters Aureus portrays with sympathy, affection, wit, Irony, compassion, understanding, humor, yet never pronounces a judgement. These are some of the people you will meet in Nagueños, a collection of stories set in Roman Catholic Naga on the eve of the Third Millennium.