Aling Lilay of Luzon Avenue (translated by Kristine Ong Muslim for Anomaly, 2022)

Fungi (Translated by Kristine Ong Muslim for the National Translation Month, 2021)

Ang Lihim ng Nakasimangot na Maskara (excerpt from the novel, Cotabato Literary Journal, 2018)

Kabanalan sa Panahon ng Digma (Likhaan 10, University of the Philippines Creative Writing Center, 2016)

Mga (Balangiga Press, 2016; from the collection May Rush Hour Ba sa Third World Country?)

Colon (excerpt from the novel, Balangiga Press, 2016)

REVIEWS

ASYMPTOTE JOURNAL: “As an unflinching and challenging look at a country’s history and its people struggling for survival, Braga brings compassion and complexity to this urban space where the professional and the personal intersect, culminating in rich stores of love, connection, and memory—and what they mean to us as both individuals and members of communities.” Read the entire review here:

LITRO MAGAZINE: “Rogelio Braga’s stories play with face-value images and pre-conceived ideas, reminding us that we often need someone to make a rhetorical remark in order to evince change. Many of the characters are aware of the system of violence, yet are unable to navigate out of it, either through sheer powerlessness or forced choice. Perhaps it is simply that the map they draw only leads to another dead-end. Therefore, in a way, their movement feels almost like being stuck in a congested street during rush hour: everyone wants to be somewhere but are incapacitated by the space, and silently poisoned by all the pollution.” Read the entire review here.

ALSO READ University of Sussex-based historian Hana Qugana‘s response to the HISTORY TODAY magazine’s provocation ‘Does the Concept of the Third World have any Historical Value?: “Historical value derives from the shared benefit of the stories we tell, according to the times in which they are told. But time – and also history – is valued differently in the postcolony. The writer Rogelio Braga said as much in their recent collection of short stories about Philippine society, Is There Rush Hour in a Third World Country? Set during the rise of global outsourcing in the 2000s (think call centres), it follows the lives of the working poor and aspiring middle classes, lived at all hours, every day of the week. From 3am lunch breaks in a mini-mart to romantic rendezvous in a Catholic church, ‘time off’ in this former American and Spanish colony is finite and rarely one’s own. Braga’s conscious use of ‘Third World’, as opposed to ‘developing’, is (as Eric Abalajon puts it) ‘a declaration that it is not a question of catching up in order to taste the elusive fruits of neoliberalism, but a demand to reimagine better living conditions for people who can hardly take a break from labour or know very little of life outside of it’.”