Maximum Volume

IntroductionSOON after we issued the call for submissions for the second Maximum Volume, stories started flooding our inboxes from all over the country and across the seas. Sarge Lacuesta and I, delighted by the response and wanting to give ourselves enough time to fully digest and appreciate each entry, began reading well before our announced Reading Period. Every now and then, someone states that the short story in the Philippines is dead. In the past, the argument was that Filipino writers did not take naturally to the form, or worse, could only produce pale replicas of Western stories and had nothing truly good or original to contribute. These lines of argument have been proven wrong time and time again. Nowadays, some say that the short story is irrelevant, a dinosaur in this age of SMS, listicles, and tweets. The young person’s attention span and need for a quick fix are trotted out as death knells. However, the truth is that more people are reading fiction of all lengths these days. Just as one example, w*****d’s second biggest market is the Philippines. Filipinos are not just reading and engaging in conversations about what they’ve read, but also producing digital content that finds its way into the print medium. We received so many excellent stories that once again we found it impossible to keep our choices down to ten or an even dozen. These fourteen stories are remarkable in many ways, representing the variety of voices currently enriching and expanding Philippine literature—all of them under the age of forty-five. There are stories of wonder and mystery, small domestic dramas and rousing speculative fiction, pieces rife with joy and sadness told in different ways. All of them from the imagination of Filipino authors. But you’ll see for yourself. Go ahead. Start at the beginning or jump around as you please. These stories are waiting for you. Dean Francis Alfar Manila, 2016 I BELIEVE that the Filipino short story has come into its own: you only need to hear its confident tenderness in Ian Rosales Casocot’s “Fly-Over Country,” to witness its powers of observation in Mara Coson’s “Godjira, tempura, sakura, Tsukiji, shinkansen, izakaya” to feel its intoxicating hold on you in Sasha Martinez’s “The Auroras.” And you only need to sit with all the other stories in this second Maximum Volume to understand why the short story is not a novel-in-waiting, or a student’s exercise, or an experiment in form, or the kind of half-formed, half-committed embryonic creature many paint it out to be. The contemporary Filipino short story in English, as defined by these young writers, is also still full of promise. 45—the age limit prescribed by the editors for those contributing to the Maximum Volume series—is, after all, an age still brimming with expectation. Contributors to Maximum Volume must also be Filipino, and while all of these stories are in English, and some of them are set in other times or other worlds, they speak with a language that is completely our own. In short, each of these Filipino short stories you are about to thoroughly enjoy is a story, in full term, in full force, in full. Angelo R. Lacuesta Manila, 2016