Selected Short Stories by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard

Finalist for the 40th National Book Awards in the Philippines Selected Short Stories by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard collects 39 of the award-winning Filipina American author's short fiction. The book includes some of her best short stories, including fiction that deal with fictional Manila and Mexico, Intramuros and Acapulco, Ubec and Cebu. The book has been praised as follows: Powerful, poignant and engrossing, the Selected Short Stories by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard is an important work by a major writer. Written in a poetic style rich in imagery, her observant eye's subject is both transnational and local, societal and relational in the more personal scale of family, friendship, love. These stories have an oral quality in the best sense of the word, by a master of the form. Brian Ascalon Roley, author of Ambuscade and American Son, and Professor of English, Miami University. Cecilia Manguerra Brainard's short stories cover not just the history of the Philippines – Spanish and American colonial rule, the bloody Marcos era, the high price of fighting for political and economic freedom – but also the deeply moving hesitations and complexities of the human heart: the loves and longings and losses that shape and haunt a life, the sensuality and desires that rip apart the fabric of social life, the intricacies of girlhood and female friendship, the confrontation of cultures, the loneliness and courage of Filipino-Americans and others who have left their homelands and the idea of home. Beautifully written, masterfully crafted, these stories are at once heart-breaking, entertaining, and profoundly humane — very difficult to put down, impossible to forget. Reine Arcache Melvin, author of The Betrayed: A Novel . Cecilia Brainard's well-crafted stories deal with fictional Manila and Mexico, Intramuros and Acapulco, Ubec and Cebu. She has the uncanny ability to enter the skin of her characters and give them their singular voices. Her Selected Stories only affirm what we have long known: that she has already vaulted into the front rank of the Philippines' best writers fiction. Brava!" Danton Remoto, author of Riverrun, A Novel. Cecilia Brainard is the author of over 20 books, including the novels: When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, Magdalena, and The Newspaper Widow. She has received awards, including a California Arts Council Fellowship, a Brody Arts Fund Fellowship, an Outstanding Individual Award from Cebu, a City of Los Angeles Cultural Grant, and more. She has served as an Executive Board Member of PEN; and she has also served as an officer in such groups as Pacific Asian American Women Writers West, and the Arts & Letters at the Cal State University, Los Angeles.