The Collected Stories of Jose Garcia Villa

by José García Villa (Editor), Jonathan Chua (Editor, with an Introduction by)

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.

Genres: Fiction

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Jose Garcia Villa was a Filipino poet, literary critic, short story writer, and painter. He was awarded the National Artist of the Philippines title for literature in 1973, as well as the Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing by Conrad Aiken. He is known to have introduced the "reversed consonance rime scheme" in writing poetry, as well as the extensive use of punctuation marks—especially commas, which made him known as the Comma Poet. He used the penname Doveglion (derived from "Dove, Eagle, Lion"), based on the characters he derived from himself. These animals were also explored by another poet e.e. cummings in Doveglion, Adventures in Value, a poem dedicated to Villa.

(From wikipedia.org, retrieved 14 March 2011. More info here.)

Reviews

[Emarie]

nice