Collected Stories & Tales

With a career spanning more than twenty years, Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo has written some of the best short fiction in English that Philippine literature has to offer. Collected Stories and Tales gathers most of her published short fiction, including stories that appeared in the Philippines Graphic (1969-1971), Ballad of a Lost Season (1987), Tales for a Rainy Night (1993), and Where Only the Moon Rages (1994), as well as tales from two of her novels, Recuerdo (2005) and A Book of Dreams (2001). Also included here are her little known first novel Vida, (serialized in the magazine Mr. & Ms. in 1981); stories printed in international anthologies; and two previously unpublished stories. 

This collection not only encompasses Hidalgo’s distinctive voices over the years, but it also recalls the power of tales—especially in this writer’s hands—to draw out the most honest, most human truths.

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Books like this one are designed to allow readers to chart the development of the writer’s art, from its beginnings to the present day. They also serve to introduce the writer’s body of work to a new generation of readers.

All these stories are drawn from real life, even those that Hidalgo calls modern tales. “So perhaps the fairy tale mode was just a disguise, a strategy for masking the identity of the characters and the truth of the plots… I have also come to see that, though magic is essential to the tale, ‘magic’ need not mean the supernatural. What must always be present is enchantment, a kind of spell. And, in my humble way, that is what I tried to work toward.”