Here at last, insofar as possible for the meticulous and indefatigable scholar, an amazing collection of the entire corpus of Jose Garcia Villa’s short stories! And Jonathan Chua’s Introduction is exemplary for the historical context it provides of the short story in Villa’s time, and for its perceptive and therefore just interpretive-critical assessment of Villa as fictionist. Through all the stories in light of that assessment, we see how Villa as fictionist gained his critical acumen in the art of fiction whereby as its critic he cleared the ground for its maturity in the development of Philippine fiction; likewise, Villa’s agon with the medium of expression for substance and form led him to poetry as Doveglion: the stories are the sea, says Villa, the poems the horizon, for the sea designed the horizon.
Published in 2015.