SOURCE: "A People of Many Pasts and Complex Parts: José Garcia Villa," in New Writings from the Philippines: A Critique and Anthology, Syracuse University Press, 1966, pp. 103-10.

In this excerpt, Casper provides an introducton to Villa's stories and poems.

Although five of his earliest tales were reproduced in the Selected Stories of Jose Garcia Villa (1962), in tribute to the first prolonged revisit by the distinguished expatriate in nearly thirty years, the fiction of Villa is mainly an academic curiosity today. When Scribner's published his collection, Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others, in 1933, Villa had already committed himself to writing exclusively as a poet. Consequently, the stories are primarily of interest as commentaries on the kinds of attitudes and techniques now associated with his poetry; and, ultimately, Villa's importance to fiction is as its critic, not as its writer.

A third of the twenty-one stories in...