Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America — Cecilia Manguerra Brainard

CONTEMPORARY FICTION BY FILIPINOS IN AMERICA, edited by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, collects 26 short stories by Filipino and Philippine American writers, including Luis Cabalquinto, Linda Ty-Casper, Jay Ruben Dayrit, Alma Jill Dizon, Ligaya Victoria Fruto, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Vince Gotera, Paulino Lim, Jr., Veronica Montes, Oscar Penaranda, Edgar Poma, Greg Sarris, Eileen Tabios, John Silva, Marianne Villanueva, Fatima Lim-Wilson, and others. First published in the Philippines in 1998, this 2021 US edition of the short story anthology hopes to accommodate librarians, professors, teachers, and students interested in Philippine American literature, books which are still scarce in the US. This collection is considered a valuable literary resource.*****Harold Augenbraum praised the book in MANOA, saying: By pulling these personal, fictional quests together, the reader indeed comes away with a varied portrait of Filipinos in America, not the expression of dark causality present in the earlier generations of writers, such as Bulosan and Santos — those fantastic conjurors of Filipino American literature — but of people cautiously settling into what they hope will be a comfortable position … So many of these stories convey loneliness, disconnectedness, and an inability to form lasting attachments … This collection abounds with such tension … Brainard has done a fine job of bringing many little-known writers – and the edginess of Filipinos in America – to the fore.