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Jessica Hagedorn has received enormous critical acclaim for her edgy, high-energy novels chronicling the clash and embrace of American and Filipino cultures. With Dream Jungle, she breaks through to a new level of narrative daring and has written her most complex and accomplished novel to date. Dream Jungle takes off from two seemingly unrelated events-the discovery of a lost Stone Age tribe in a remote mountainous area of the Philippines and the filming of an epic Vietnam War movie in the rain forest. But the "lost tribe" just might be a clever hoax masterminded by a brooding wealthy iconoclast-and the Hollywood movie seems doomed as the cast and crew continue to self-destruct in a cloud of drugs and egos. At once a sensual and razor-sharp indictment of colonialism, Dream Jungle evokes the desperate beauty and rank corruption of the Philippines from the height of the Marcos era in the mid-1970s to the end of the twentieth century. [via]