Don't Blink: Stories

Ten stories. One country caught between what it dreams of becoming and what it cannot escape.

In Don't Blink, JB Lazarte turns his gaze on the Philippines at the uneasy intersection of love, ambition, technology, poverty, politics, family, and loss.

A young man watches his dot-com dreams unravel as a nation convulses around him. An eighteen-year-old girl longs for the one thing that will make her feel she belongs. Fathers and sons confront the wreckage of failed dreams. Ordinary people reach for connection, dignity, escape—and sometimes discover how quickly everything can change.

By turns darkly funny, unsettling, tender, and tragic, these stories find the extraordinary inside seemingly ordinary Filipino lives.

Because the forces that shape us are often the ones we cannot see.

And sometimes, everything changes in the time it takes to blink.