Over a cup of ginger tea : conversations on the literary narratives of Filipino women / Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo.

and cover conventional realist novels and short stories, as well as fairy tales, chick lit, crime fiction, and war memoirs.

The author describes the essays in this collections as "mongrels of a short" part personal essay and part literary commentary or criticism. "I would like to call them 'literary essays," because they are about literature and because I Hope they are writtern in a style which will make the reading of them as pleasant an experience for the reader as is the reading of other types of literature. I think they would fit under that larger category of creative nonfiction." She describes what she wishes to do as "start a conversation with the reader, over a cup of ginger tea, as it were (or over a coffee mug or a glass of beer), much as I try to do with my students when I teach literature. I try to interest them in the stories which for different reasons have fascinated me all these years. And in doing this, I hope to come a little closer to understanding myself how literature does what it does, and why it is not likely to go away, though it might morph in strange ways, cease to be 'works' and become 'texts', relocate to cyberspace, become interactive, whatever." The conversations range over the narratives of several generations of women writers, from Maria Paz Mendoza and Edith Tiempo to F.H. Batacan and Tara Sering