₱175
By Delfin Fresnosa
Published by Far Eastern University, ©2005.
The recognition accorded to Hernando R. Ocampo, Francisco Arcellana, and N.V.M. Gonzalez as National Artists brings to mind the group of
young writers who flared like meteors across the Philippine literary sky during the third decade of the 20Oth century. They called themselves the Veronicans. Some, like Arcellana and Gonzalez, were to blaze much longer and brighter in the firmament than the rest. Others, like Delfin Fresnosa, would eventually fade quietly into oblivion.
Unknown to many students of Philippine literature, Fresnosa was a prolific writer. His works were varied: short stories, children’s stories and folktales retold, a novelette, and critical as well as familiar essays. He was at work on a novel when he died in 1988. But it is with the short story that he established his literary reputation. Even without formal training in the craft, he wrote close to a hundred of them.
Some of his short stories have been incuded in a number of anthologies, and surveys of Philippine writing in English make mention of his representative works. He even gained some recognition abroad. “Tragedy at Lumba’s Bend” drew attention in London where it was reprinted as “Death at Lumba’s Bend” in the literary quarterly, Life and Letters Today (Summer 1937). And Edward L. O’Brien, in The Best Short Stories, 1938, listed it as one of the distinguished short stories that saw print in 1937.
The stories in this collection originally appeared in Philippine Magazine, The Commonwealth Advocate, The Sunday Tribune Magazine, The Weekly Graphic, The Monthly Post, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Philippines Free Press, The Evening News Saturday Magazine, and This Week. A number of them have been included in anthologies of Philippine writing in English. They are part of a critical edition of the collected works of Delfin Fresnosa, a product of a painstaking, but very rewarding, editorial process (textual criticism) involving the gathering, collation, and analysis of extant copies/editions of the literary pieces and enendation of possible errors still present in the established copy texts. The stories have been arranged chronologically, the better for any student of Philippine literature to study the development of the writer’s craft.
-Teresita E. Erestain
Description: 214 pages ; 21.5 x 13.8 cm
Language: English
ISBN: 978-971-678-011-7
In stock
