Award-winning stories and tales about the rites of passage in our lives—love and loss, gladness and grief, departure and return—written in the realistic and fabulist modes

A collection of short fiction on love, longing and loss written in the realist and fantastic modes. A young boy and his sisters gather beautiful shells on the beach as mementos of a country they will leave behind. A girl who loves the Beatles sees dwarfs that are drawn charcoal-black on a white plate. A rich matron in Singapore discovers a primeval thing in her ritzy penthouse. A poor woman in the boondocks gives birth to a mudfish. Dead lovers buried beneath a hotel ruined by an earthquake reach out to each other. And a woman poisoned in Scotland centuries ago still haunts a hilltop castle, looking for her dead lover.

These and other memorable characters inhabit Danton Remoto’s book of stories and tales. Some of the stories are written in the realistic mode. They poke fun at a colorful but violent dictatorship or track the same-sex love in a young man’s heart. The others are written in the fantastic mode—fables, parables, origin tales, cheeky rewriting of rural lore and urban legends. The length of the stories also varies. Some are flash fiction, while the others have the sweep of a novella. The stories are meant to entertain but also to instruct: why the present is just a re-looping of the past, why love remains constant and true even beyond death. Written with daring and with dash, this book comes from the pen of ‘one of Asia’s best writers’.

Danton Remoto studied publishing s at the University of Stirling (British Council scholar) and world literature at Rutgers University (Fulbright scholar). He was also an Association of Southeast Asian Nations scholar in English Literature at Ateneo de Manila University and a research scholar in Asian Literature at the National University of Singapore. He has worked as a publishing director at Ateneo, head of communications at the United Nations Development Program,  president of The Manila Times College, and head of school at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia.

He has published twelve books, including Riverrun. He translated the 1906 novel by Lope K. Santos, Banaag at Sikat, into English (Radiance and Sunrise) for the Southeast Asian Literary Classics series, as well as the novels by Amado V. Hernandez, Ibong Mandaragit (The Preying Birds) and Crocodile’s Tears (Luha ng Buwaya). He is currently the News Editor of The Manila Times.

He is a co-editor of Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing in 1994, which was the first multiauthor anthology of gay writing  in Southeast Asia and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in the US. His body of literary work is cited in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Literature. He has been a literature fellow at the Cambridge University Summer Seminar on Contemporary Literature, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont and the MacDowell Arts Residency in New Hampshire. He is now writing his third novel set in New York City as well as his fourth collection of poems. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Southeast Asia.