The Justice League of People of Color Schadenfreude

A group of six Filipina New Yorkers—self-described “Third World witches” who grew up with fascists, goons, and torture apologists—find themselves entangled in a high-profile murder investigation.

At a West Village restaurant after Trump’s first election, six friends gather to eat, bicker, sing songs of schadenfreude, and quote Gramsci. They name themselves the Justice League of People of Color Schadenfreude: They’ve survived fascism once, in the Philippines, and what’s happening in America feels awfully familiar. Eight years later, in the wake of Trump’s reelection, a member of their circle becomes an accidental witness to the killing of a CEO, and the group is thrust into new political dangers. As Trump unleashes wave after wave of authoritarian violence, years of gallows humor give way to action, and a plan begins to form, a plot to transform Filipino workers laboring invisibly in the US into shadow revolutionaries.

With her wild sense of play, razor-sharp satire, and brilliant cast of characters, Gina Apostol delivers a novel unlike any she has written before, even as it deepens her signature concerns: the entanglements of the United States and the Philippines, empire and authoritarianism, the erasures of history and its stubborn return. Schadenfreude is hilarious and exasperating, passionate and unsettling—a comic fable for our stupid, evil times, animated by insights only Apostol could conjure.